Inquiry - Inventions Room Five - Yr 3 & 4

SUMMARY

Successes

Immersion
The idea of ‘Invention’ is huge so the children had to think about what they knew already, about inventions and their purposes. These ideas were recorded on a Fishbone G.O. They worked in pairs, learning from one another, then shared their ideas in groups of six. Some students debated whether something was an invention or not. eg. carrot seeds. I asked them to find out. The children worked in pairs filling in an Alpha Ladder, thinking about how many inventions they could think of in 15 minutes. FUN

Making another person’s invention and experimenting with them [origami peeking crows and sailboats] made the children think about the process of making someone else’s design. They learned that you needed to follow instructions carefully to succeed but also, that there was always someone in your group to help you, a benefit of participating together. They found out that inventing was creating.

Guess what I am? talks about an Invention where the students had to describe the Invention and it’s action, was fun and made everyone listen carefully to the clues before they gave a calculated guess. Then the invention was shown to everybody and handled. The children gained a lot of knowledge from each other. They also had to think about a previous or similar invention which had the same purpose or a later adapted invention, these class discussions took place after each talk.

During instructional reading, two groups read about Inventors and their unusual Inventions. They had to read a short passage of information, then choose their answer from 4 multiple choice possibilities and then substantiate their answers. The children had to think carefully, assimilating information from the text and the diagrams. The children gave very valid explanations for their answers having made informed judgements.
Participating and Contributing
Working in teams with the Year Ones and Twos, from the ORGANISING Stage to EVALUATION gave the Year Three and Four students an opportunity to be leaders. They learned to accommodate the younger children, and the younger children watched and listened, and were encouraged to participate and contribute to their team activities, learning all the time from the older children. The younger children were supported in activities eg using Graphic Organisers. The teacher’s role was to encourage.
The Participating and Contributing Rubric which the classes ‘owned,’ was referred to often – how do we work successfully together? And the children knew. The biggest benefit to the children in Teams was the pooling of ideas and shared expertise. They analysed possibilities together, agreeing or disagreeing – reasoning, looking at Data- finding out what information it was giving them etc. Everyone listened to each other and asked questions.


Graphic Organisers

Question Map –Organise Stage - Difficulties and Successes

This has been modelled by the teacher more than once, with the children contributing their ideas for them. The KEY WORDS became obvious to most children eg. Chocolate Sailboats need to be TASTY. How can we make them TASTY? I still find that a few children have the greatest difficulty working out what the verb should be. For example, Snake pencils NEED pipe cleaners, Snake pencils MUST be attractive. Also when this part has been done, the odd child forgets to write the question and just writes the answer. They need to look at the question starters - Kiplings Seven Servants down the side of the page to help them. I give these children examples of verbs you can use and a model to check on.
When each team did a question map for their product, a large model was displayed on the wall for them to refer to. Each part was done in a different colour to make it stand out clearly. All the teams completed theirs successfully with lots of discussion, and they found out that they’d gained some very useful information that would help them with the next Stage, the planning and design of their product. They learned ‘where to go next.’

Chain of Events-Discover Stage

Using the Chain of Events G.O. made the children think about the practical aspects required, before making their chosen invention
eg. when, where, how, what, etc This G.O. clearly illustrated ‘discovery’ the children learning from it, what was needed to be done before they could begin the Sharing Stage of Making.