I have this theory that if I think long enough about things, I'll figure it out. That can sometimes result in lots of thinking! I suddenly remembered something I've been wondering about....what is the difference between spaghetti, pizza and marinara sauce? I started thinking about how I would work at finding the answer. I thought of a huge book about food in the reference section at the public library (learned about in the reference class). I thought about calling the county extension agent to see how she would explain it. I could check recipes to see what ingredients or processes are different. But how would this link to standards? Maybe it would connect in the high school group, but I'm listed in the younger age group. Dr. Lamb says anything can be connected to standards--this would be my opportunity to find out how to do that!
But then I came back to my cotton plant growing on my deck. I've showed this plant to various people in my life and as we chat about it, always come up with questions that I don't have the answers to! It's soon going to be too cold to keep it on the deck, so I'll take it to school and share it with my first graders. At this point, I don't have a plan for what we're going to do with it at school. Learning about cotton is something I'm going to need to be doing anyway in light of what I plan to do with it, and this way I would do a better job of having a plan. I also don't know a lot about how it grows (the conditions it needs) or how it is harvested and what happens next. It will be interesting to see what questions the kids ask.....oh, dear, what if they aren't interested? Hadn't thought about that before! (I did successfully interest them in observing the life cycle of a monarch butterfly by bringing in monarch caterpillars.) I think this project can be linked more easily to standards.
So...I've decided....I'm going to learn about how cotton grows. I made my decision based on a curiousity. Because of my plan to take it to school, I'll need to pursue further learning anyway, so why not make this my project? But, someday, I will find out the difference between spaghetti, pizza and marinara sauce!
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I noticed the Big6 model ((Eisenberg and Berkowitz) start this at a little different point--at least in my mind it's different. Lamb's "Ws of Information Exploration and Inquiry" starts with the "Watching"/Exploring phase which, to me, seems to be the space to do some thoughtful pondering of possibilities and kind of testing various topics to research. If the topic is teacher assigned, there's really not much need for the "watching/exploring" stage. If the student is determining the topic, this is a valuable part of inquiry to recognize.
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