We've Been Thinking....



Image: 'I'm thinking of...'
http://www.flickr.com/photos/43698630@N00/2403249501

We have been working through the inquiry process - connect, wonder, investigate, create, share and reflect.  Before we actually investigate our countries let's take a look back at the hard work we have done so far.
Questioning: 
We talked about different kinds of questions. We want  to try and have higher level questions rather than "quick-finds" or "Google" questions.

Organizing:
We spent some time thinking about how we can organize the questions we have into categories in order to find the answers more efficiently.  We thought that organizing by topics such government and climate was easier than using the 5W's and How.

Co-Constructing Criteria
We want this project to be your project and have your input.  In small groups you discussed what criteria or qualities an excellent project should include. We then put all of our ideas together and looked at the different what we would need to do in order to have an exemplar project.  We decided that there was too much to look at once so as we are working on a certain section we will have focus on that part of the rubric.

Blogging:
Here we answered some of your questions: What is blogging? What makes a good blog? What are descriptive comments?  We looked at some of the Edublog nominees and talked about comments.  After learning about the types of comments we as a class decided to expect we began to blog in the comment section.  We want to move towards students taking over the posts and the blog.

Text Features and Text Structures:
Before we had a gallery walk to check out the different countries, we discussed how non-fiction books are organized so they can help us find asnwers to our questions. After looking at the different books and looking for different types of text features we began to narrow the choices of countries we wished to investigate.

So up to this point what is one thing you have learned and what is one question you still have about we have learned.  Mr. B. also would like you to tell everyone your country.