Inquiry through Discovery ...

What a fabulous discovery morning today.  We enjoyed exploring lots of bug and insect activities, learning all about their anatomy and habitats.

We examined photos of different insects and then recreated them out of playdough ...

We explored our bug habitat (see previous post about buddy class time) and found some creepy-crawlies ...

Our 'Bug Habitats' are now in our class gardens...

And some children chose their favourite bug and 'captured' it in a mason jar for closer investigation ...

We are well and truly 'tuned-in' to our Don't Bug Me inquiry, finding and sorting lots of information about these small and wondrous little creatures that reside in our gardens.  I wonder what we'll learn about next?

Alex's special find...

During maths today Alex discovered a special creature on our 100's board ... a tiny wee spider.  We had a close up look with a magnifying glass and then Alex very carefully took it out to our class garden and released it ...

We're bug-eyed about bugs and insects ...

We are loving our Inquiry topic about bugs and insects.  At lunchtimes the children can be found looking for bugs and scouring the garden and school fields for signs of any, there's lots of discussion in class and even role-play.  

We have brainstormed what we already know about bugs - quite a bit ...

In our conversations, we wondered where some of these bugs live.  We decided to sort our findings using a venn diagram.  We talked about how we could sort them and the children came up with three categories: in the garden, inside or in the bush and we don't know/somewhere else.  

Since there are so many different sorts of bugs and insects, we have decided to focus on the ones in the garden, since this is how we came to be talking about them in the first place (see our previous garden posts).  

We thought long and hard about what we'd like to know about bugs that live in the garden.  The children came up with lots of different questions, which Mrs P was able to summarise into four main ones...

Click on the picture above to read our e-book of wonderings...

There were lots of ideas about where we could find information to help answer our questions. Anvesha suggested we read books and Faisal thought we could go to the library.  Mrs P has got lots of lovely books about bugs and insects from the National Library and school library for us to look through.  Ollie thought we could look in the garden and Cooper thought we could look at the bugs.  We are so lucky to have lots of gardens at school, we will certainly be exploring this way.  We can also look on the internet where there is lots of information and photos.  Our learning journey is going to be really interesting ... 

Our Inquiry Journey so far...

Today our buddy class A7 came and spent some time with us talking about habitats.  They explained that a habitat was where something lived. We brainstormed ideas about the habitat in which bugs and insects might live in the garden.  We went on a scavenger hunt around the school to find bits and pieces, so we can make our very own bug habitat for our garden ...

Introducing Buggles ...

Buggles is your guide on our class' exciting Inquiry journey into bugs and insects this term.  If you're in our classroom, be sure to check out our Inquiry wall to see what we've been up to (and of course, keep reading our blog posts)... 

How Plants Drink ...

In our learning about plants this week, we found out that plants absorb nutrients and moisture through their stems.

We were all quite intrigued with the experiment at the end of this clip.  We just happened to have some flowers in our classroom that we've been enjoying from our Mummy & Me morning, so we thought we'd give it a go ourselves.

We took the white flower and trimmed the stem.  We placed it into a jar with blue dye and water.

Before lunch we checked to see if there was any changes.  The end of the petals had started to go blue and streaky.  Most of us weren't sure if the flowers would get any bluer.

At the end of the day we were surprised to see how blue the flowers had gone.  We will check them again after the weekend.

The flower drank the coloured water and as the water traveled up the stem and into the petals, it carried the blue dye with it. As the blue dye reached the petals, they have taken on the colour of the water.

We have worked out what is happening, but have not worked out what this means for us with the plants we have planted in our garden.  We'll be talking about this during the week, and will update this post to let you know what we think.  In science, this is called 'making conclusions'.  I wonder what we will conclude?

Meaningful Maths ...

Learning about and with numbers is exciting when it's meaningful and the children are all engaged in what we're doing.  In our class we have a 'Warm Fuzzy' jar ... when the children work together to do something 'super-duper', they're awarded with 'warm fuzzies'.  When the jar is full we will be having a special party.

On Wednesday the children were given some warm fuzzies after completing a piece of work and all remembering to put their name on their work (something we've been working really hard on doing), one of the children asked, "I wonder how many warm fuzzies there are in the jar?" and from there a fabulous maths lesson unfolded ...

We talked about different ways of counting.  Jerome suggested we could "guess how many warm fuzzies are in the jar", so we did ...

There was a big range of guesses from 10-100.  Scarlett suggested we could "count them by the different colours so we can work it out", so we did ...

The children all took one or two warm fuzzies and sorted them on a table into a big, long row into the different colours.  Then we counted each colour.  

There were 5 different colours and 5 different numbers to add together.  This was very hard ... we have been learning about adding numbers to 10, but there was way more than 10 warm fuzzies.  Nicholas suggested we could "add two numbers together and then those ones" to make it easier.  We used our maths knowledge, using our fingers and counting to add up the first two numbers 8 + 12, then 11 + 1.  Then we worked out 20 + 12 and added the 16 purple ones.  With everyone helping and sharing ideas, and using materials (the warm fuzzies and some counters) and the 100's board, we counted 48 warm fuzzies in total.  We went back to our line up on the table and counted 1:1 to check if we'd got it right and we had.  We were all so pleased with ourselves and had done such a good job with our maths, that Mrs P put another handful of warm fuzzies in the jar to celebrate.  

We are really looking forward to our 'Jar Full' party.  We think it will come sooner than later since the jar is already over 1/2 full.  We also think it will take about twice as many as we already have to fill it.  We have all made a guess (an estimate) of how many warm fuzzies we think it will take to full the jar completely.  The student who gets the closest answer will get a special prize.  

This was a great session, with some wonderful rich discussion, maths vocabulary (estimate, guess, count, add, total, altogether, twice as many, half ...) and concepts all shared as a group.  We'll count the warm fuzzies again when the jar is full.

After our warm-fuzzy counting, the children enjoyed sorting, counting and adding groups together using counters, beads, connector cubes and teddy bears.  It was great to see them applying some of their new knowledge independently, in different ways.

E7's super-duper garden...

Earlier in the year we blogged about our class garden.  We thought long and hard about what to plant and when.  Over the last week we've been busy preparing the soil and planting our special garden...

Remember when E6 and E7 painted a bird bath together?  Well it now has pride of place in our combined garden (we are super-duper lucky to have one garden each and in between, a shared space).  We have been thinking about what sort of garden this might be ... ideas so far include a wild flower garden or a bug garden.

When we'd finished planting our seeds and seedlings, we thought about how we will need to look after them to help them grow.  We know we need soil, space, light, water and air and we have made sure we will have all of those things in our garden, but many of the children thought we needed some signs so that other students knew the garden was ours, and to ask them to not touch the plants so they could get on with growing.  So we worked in pairs and designed and made posters ...

Today we planted some bulbs.  We thought that once the seedlings had grown and are harvested, the flower seeds might be coming up, and when they have grown and died away, the bulbs would be coming up.  Well, that's what we're hoping anyway.

After our bulbs were planted, we marked the two sides of our garden with a little 'fence' made out of string and iceblock sticks.  On one side of the fence is our 'edible garden' and on the other side are our flowers.  We added a gorgeous colourful windmill and secured our posters around the garden edging ...

We are very proud of our garden and want to help look after it and watch to see when the plants start growing.

After planting our own garden, we wondered what other gardens in our school have in them.  We took a walk around the school grounds to find out ...

One of E block's garden - they've been having a pumpkin growing contest...

Did you know we have weta hotels at our school? 

Almost camouflaged...

We have a lizard garden out on the junior field too...

And a bee garden...

We have a young fruit orchard which was planted last year...

We didn't realise how many cool gardens we had around our awesome school.  Not only did we discover the gardens, but we also saw lots of creepy critters along the way including caterpillars, snails, worms and ants.  When we got back to class we recorded what we'd found and talked about what other sorts of bugs or insects we might find living in our gardens. 

We wrote a shared story about what we can see in the garden,
and then had turns writing our own.