Inquiry Based Instruction

This week our lab was centered around inquiry-based instructions. Inquiry-based learning was something that I struggled for a bit. When it comes to teaching, I like to provide a lot of content and instruction where I have more control to make sure students are getting the information needed. Inquiry-based instruction is different where students are having more control over how they are getting the content. At first, I thought I was going to struggle in the lab, but by the end of it, I really enjoyed doing inquiry.

I found a few gems and opportunities for improvements for my inquiry lesson on food insecurity. Students enjoyed my interested when they had to find cards with countries on them and research a fun fact about the country. It was a great way for them to start to think about other countries that lead to learning about some challenges those countries faced.

An area improvement was changing how students research countries by giving a set list of websites to use. Students ended up finding a site that was going to be used in a later portion and gave away information to early so that part of the lesson wasn't as impactful.

Overall I really liked this lab and excited to use it during student teaching.

Literacy Strategies !

Including literacy strategies in the classrooms, students can work on their comprehension skills. Students spend a lot of time listening to teachers and getting spoon fed information and not as much time writing and reading about the content that they are learning. These skills can help students make sense of the information that they are reading. The strategies can help students with:

• Making connections
• Visualizing
• Questioning 
• Determine Importance 
• Synthesizing 

In inquiry-based learning, students will have to use each of those areas, so literacy strategies are a great way to help students develop them.

Some strategies include:

• Chapter tours
• Think-Write-Pair Share 
• Prediction Pairs 
• double-entry diaries 

One strategy that I planned on using in student teaching is Chapter Tour. This is done before starting a chapter when students take a "tour" through the chapter to familiarize themselves with topics, terms, images. This would be extremely helpful when you go over difficult chapters with students and gives you an idea of what areas students will struggle with.