pyp

What is Open Inquiry?

Grade K-2, Sharing the Planet

What? Open inquiry is a purposeful time of our day lasting about 45 minutes, where students engage in a variety of learning engagements that are connected to our learning objectives.

How? Open Inquiry is set-up as stations around the Hub that student’s “sign-up” for. At the beginning of the year, we asked students each day which station they would like to engage in first and then either wrote their name or moved their photo marker to visually represent the sign-up. Towards the middle of the year we introduced students keeping track of their own movement between stations with a personal Open Inquiry checklist. Students know that they do not need to stay at the same station for the entirety of the time, but should be engaged in each activity for an extended period of time, minimum of 15 minutes of engagement to start. The student’s checklist was further modified to include “must-dos” and “can-dos” to allow choice, but also highlight various stations that throughout the week they must attend. A teacher is always present at a “must-do” station to also document which students have engaged in that activity, although primarily it is the child’s job to recognize if they have or have not done the learning engagement yet for the week.

Why? Open Inquiry is really about students being able to explore their interests in connection to a broader theme. It’s also a time where real thoughtful differentiation can occur that meets kids where they are in terms of their readiness level and best methodology for learning. Prior to implementing Open Inquiry in the Hub environment, we would have daily free play time. Although we still incorporate free play periodically throughout the week, allowing students complete choice over any engagements in the space, we found that not only were students going to the same area again and again but many students didn’t know where to go at all. Open inquiry gives students opportunity for discovery, for enrichment in our learning and for being a Risk-taker and trying new things. Since we change the engagements weekly, students have enough time to explore the stations put out and go back to a favorite before they’re ready for a new challenge.

What does this look like in connection to a Unit of Inquiry?

Let’s take a look at what stations could look like for a Unit of Inquiry. Below is what one week of Open Inquiry looked like last year during our Sharing the Planet Unit on Living Things. We were careful to ensure that the learning engagements covered a variety of skill areas both academic and ATLS. With the stations below in additional to learning about the unit students will work on their counting and cardinality, reading/book handling, close observation skills, sorting skills, and fine motor skills.

PYP Sharing the Planet


Central Idea: Caring for living things grows from learning about nature’s cycles and how we depend on each other.

Lines of Inquiry:

  • Living things and their life cycles (change)
  • How habitats make it possible for living things to meet their needs (connection)
  • How humans can take action to protect living things in their environment (responsibility)
Sorting Living and Non-Living Things
Read to Self Unit Books
Paint a Living Thing
Order the Animals by Number of Legs
Explore if Trees are Alive and Make Your Own
Sketch like a Naturalist

Comparing and Contrasting Stories- Holiday Fun!

Grade K-2, Literacy

Common Core Reading Literature


RL.K.9 With prompting and support, compare and contrast the adventures and experiences of characters in familiar stories

What? First students compared and contrasted the popular fable, “The Gingerbread boy” with a local take on the story, “The Runaway Injera.” After making treats that resembled each story, students again compared and contrasted but this time with their sense of taste.

How? With the holidays approaching, we decided it would be fun to incorporate some different types of texts into our literacy lessons to spark student interest and provide a pathway for other fun holiday activities.

Day 1: First, we read the story “The Gingerbread Boy” by Paul Galdone. After reading the story, on our documentation chart we recorded who the characters were in the story, what the setting was, the problem in the story and the solution in the story. This was particularly interesting as it lead to a student debate on what the solution truly was! Many students said there was no solution because the gingerbread boy got eaten in the end of the school. We talked about how for the gingerbread boy there did not seem to be a solution, but for the fox who got to gobble him up there was a clear solution! This was a natural lead in to discuss how perspective of characters is something to consider when determining a problem and solution.

After we read the story, we told the children we were going to make gingerbread cookies! Each child got a chance to participate in part of the process as we needed to make three batches. Once the dough was made, the children discussed the concept of shape and how they were going to form their cookies. Each child got to choose which shape they would make their gingerbread cookie. Once out of the oven in the afternoon, students got to decorate their cookies with frosting and other sweet decorative goodies.

Rolling out our dough with different shapes

Day 2: The next day, we read the story “The Runaway Injera” by Jane Kurtz, who used to live in Ethiopia. We again documented on our classroom documentation sheet the characters of the story, the setting, the problem and solution. Students noticed that there were many similarities in the problem and solution in this story to the gingerbread boy story! However, the characters and the setting were not the same. This was a good start for our independent work follow-up.

That afternoon, students again had the opportunity to be hands-on and make their own treat. This time, students used injera bread to shape their own mini injeras. They stated that injera is a round shape so they chose the circle cutters to cut their own pieces. Each student decorated their own injera with Ethiopian spices.

Day 3: The final day of this learning engagement began with students completing an independent writing activity in their Story Workshop notebooks to “compare and contrast” the two stories. On their book, we glued a photo of each story at the top and drew a line down the middle for students to have a simple organizer to share their thinking. Students first wrote everything that was the same in a list format. Underneath on the chart they wrote everything they noticed that was different in the two stories. To differentiate this lesson, students could either write a word to go with each bullet point or they could write a complete sentence for each bullet point.

We ended our day with a taste testing party! Students received their cookie and their mini injera and we sat together for the party to try each treat. We told the children to carefully taste each, and think closely about how they would describe what they were tasting. What words would you use to describe the cookie? What about the injera? Would you use the same words or different words? At closing circle students came with their words in mind! Each child was given two sticky notes and told to write down one word to describe the cookie and one word to describe the injera. We created a whole group chart comparing and contrasting what each treat tasted like!

Students put their sticky note on our whole group chart. The blue sticky notes described their cookie and the green sticky notes described their injera.

Why? To really understand a new concept, students benefit from multiple encounters with that topic in different contexts. Although the standard for EY5 Literacy is for students to be able to compare and contrast stories, students will gain a richer understanding of comparing and contrasting if they have opportunities to compare and contrast other things. This lesson gave this opportunity, as students had a body to consider how stories can be the same or different, but also see how a similar model could be used to discuss similarities and differences for just about anything. Not only this, but students had such an enjoyable time completing immerse themselves in this fun, yummy, hands-on learning just in time for the holidays.

Weather Patterns around the World

Grade K-2, Science, Who We Are

PYP Who We Are


Central Idea: Awareness of weather patterns inspires people to create solutions for living safely and comfortably in different places.

Lines of Inquiry:

  • Patterns in weather in different places (form)
  • How people design solutions to solve problems (causation)
  • How people prepare for and respond to weather (responsibility)

What? Students explore their own identity through reflecting on memorable weather experiences and how they needed to respond to different types of weather.

How? This project began because of a student inquiry in the response to the question, “is the weather always the same in every country?” Students and families were asked to email 3-5 photos of their child experiencing weather in a different country to the teacher. It could be a country the child used to live in or a country the child had visited on vacation. Once I received the photos, I put together a basic “presentation” for the child (although if time permits and students have the tech skills, students could do this piece themselves.) Each child then shared about their weather experience, first showing where the country was on a map of the world and then sharing the photos. For the share, children discussed their experience with weather and any seasonal patterns they know of in that country and. how they needed to prepare of the type of weather they were sharing about.

Here is the outline for the presentation-

1. Child shares where their country is on a map
2. Child shares what the weather was like in the country when they were there and what they needed to prepare for that type of weather.
3. Presenter answers questions from classmates.

Why? Allowing the children to “take us” all over the world with this fun presentation, provided an opportunity for each child to share a place and a memory vastly important to them. Identity was explored further when each child got to both ask and answer questions from their classmates about their experiences, allowing us to learn new things about one another. Since many children had never experienced a different weather type than a sunny and rainy weather pattern, this provided an opportunity for students to be knowledgable and learn from each other. We practiced our listening skills, question asking skills, and presentation skills, all while being Inquirers about each other’s lives and why different weather patterns exist.

Our final weather patterns map after each child had shared their weather experiences. This map was teacher created throughout the unit using the data students shared about their weather experiences in each country.

Additional Note:

Incorporating weather into a Who We Are unit was both a challenge and an eye-opening experience for me as an educator. This unit came as a review of our Science Curriculum to incorporate the Next Generation Science Standards, a product of robust conversation and questioning as to its fit. Although there are still much elements on How the World Works in this unit, it was clear from teaching it that our experiences with weather do indeed play a huge part in how we grow up and who we become.