I cannot believe that January is almost over! This month has been a busy month for training -- literacy training for me and re-training the kids to be calm after 3 days of having a sub. But I've been working hard to include the use of technology in every day lessons despite what the guidelines we've been given to teach our literacy blocks in. :)
The previous week, we started to investigate about animals in frozen environments. So my class began with penguins. This site, Perfectly Penguins provided an amazing pre-made investigative site for kids to be able to navigate. I decided to use this site with my ELD students (I have the mostly English-only speaking kids) to do investigative inquiry-based learning. Whew! Was it hard! I think that reflecting on the previous week, I find that it was hard when it was only the students in my class that knows about navigating on the mini-laptops. They were more familiar with how to open up to my blog and navigate from there and they weren't so excited about using laptops and computers (as were students from the other two classrooms). It was also hard because of time constraints. We ended up doing it all together and my hopes of kindergarteners presenting information to their peers was shelved (for at least another couple of months) until we can have more practice researching using books and the internet.
Now we are looking into adopting and learning about polar bears! There are two websites for this:
National Wildlife Federation
and
Defenders of Wildlife
They're excited! :) I can't wait to see how much money they'll bring in to donate!
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What a risk you are taking with your learners! Inquiry-based learning is a challenge with non-readers, but working as a whole group is a great start. What is their next investigation?
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