I couldn't believe how many more children were taking action both in school and at home this past week! I haven't had to do much of my own planning for our unit as the children have taken over! This is exactly what inquiry is about and as a teacher, I am very thrilled!

Let's begin with Joseph and Snehansh. They were both spending some time reading in the classroom when they stumbled upon a book about water. It just happened to have a water cleaning/filtering experiment in it! They made the connection to our unit and were very excited to show me what they had found! We looked at the book as a class and learned that water can also be filtered using a combination of stones and sand. It took only a second before everyone was shouting that we had sand and stones in the sand pit! So off we went digging! Our results were not as good as the coffee filter that Sam brought in. So then we thought maybe if we put more layers it will work! We created a filter layered first with cotton, a piece of cloth, sand and then the stones. We found that this actually worked better! Great job to Joseph and Snehansh as well as the whole class for taking one experiment from a book and taking it going even further by adapting it!
While we were in the sand pit Allegra looked up at the sky and shouted, "Miss Pana, the sun! Can we put water out and see if it takes it up to the sky?" She ran into the classroom to get a cup and put some water in it. We left it out and true enough, the water was gone by the end of the day! Well done Allegra!
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Clara went home to see if she could find something else that might filter the water and clean the dirt out. She came to school with two small strainers. We noticed that one had bigger holes than the other. We saw that they were able to catch the bigger pieces of dirt but when we inspected the water up close, the smaller pieces were still floating in the water. Well done Clara for taking action and trying to find new ways to find out answers to our questions!

The class has also revisited our 'Wonder Wall' to see which questions we have answered and which one we want to try to inquire about next. We have decided we want to inquire about how plants use water to grow. When asked how we will do this, the children decided they wanted to plant some seeds. We have brainstormed what we may need and already children have started bringing in seeds and beans to grow! Miria has brought some green beans and tomato seeds, Sam has brought green beans and some brown ones and Joseph has brought in some little bluebird flower seeds! We are all very excited to start our plant inquiry next week!

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