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If I’m to be honest, teaching elapsed time is not my favourite thing to do. It’s pretty close to pulling my own teeth, but of course, ultimately, far more rewarding.   With interactive timelines things get far more interesting.

With 3rd grade, it is such a tricky concept to grasp, particularly with hours and minutes. And then when you throw in years and A.D and B.C ( now also known as Before the Common Era /B.C.E and the Common Era/ C.E) , we can really end up quite tied in knots. But once they’ve got it, by golly, the wee angels are soaring! And their teacher is on cloud nine with them!

The review, by the time we get to 4th and 5th grades, isn’t quite as painful, thank goodness, and fine tuning those time lines and introducing more complex variations can even become a fun experience for all involved with great digital variations that the kids love exploring. I’ll get to more of those in a bit.

There are numerous ways to teach elapsed...

I am so excited about this new tool for IB PYP classrooms! The interactive bulletin board offers so much and can quite literally become the learning hub for many of the approaches to learning skills, the unit of inquiry or a specific curricular area, all centred around the Learner Profile. It promotes international mindedness, communication skills & accountable talk, builds the attitudes of independence, tolerance and  confidence, to name a few, and encourages student agency in our classroom. This tool does it all!

Form : What does it look like?

The Learner Profile, being the centre of the IB PYP, is also the central part of this interactive bulletin board display. The  posters  with the Learner Profile descriptors are actually pockets. They are cute and colourful, with the usual kid-friendly description of what it means to be a learner through each trait.

These pockets can be stapled or pinned to your board at a kid friendly...

It never fails to amaze me, when given the opportunity to take the lead, how much our students rise to the challenge. With the enhancements to the IB PYP having recently been unveiled, I felt that this would be a great time to address co-planning the unit…..with your students as your co-planners!

Encouraging greater student agency in your classroom is more than simply listening to the student voice. In my previous post  about implementing student agency, I mentioned the difference between passive learning and active learning. Allowing the children to actively contribute to the planning of their own learning, absolutely promotes meaningful student involvement.

The unit of inquiry has been planned  in a variety of ways over the years:

• teachers develop a skeleton plan and complete it as they are informed by the childrens’ inquiries and progressing knowledge.
• teachers may collaboratively develop the unit with their team, before...

I’m an avid believer in making maths an adventure of discovery and creation rather than simply an expected chore. By integrating maths into our units of inquiry and making it an authentic experience, we are dispelling the myth that maths is boring and we turn our learners into investigators, truth seekers and explorers! Far more exciting already, don’t you think?

I’m well aware of how tricky it can be to integrate maths into all of our units of inquiry and so there are several alternative routes that I turn to when the going gets tough, which I’ll be sharing soon in a future post. But for today, I want to share how picture books are one of the easiest ways to bring the adventure back to your maths lessons.

Here are some of my favourites that I’ve found provoke inquiry and are simple to slot into multiple units of inquiry, whilst covering many maths standards. Many of them are flexible enough to adapt for all ages. You can link directly to each book for...

The biggest question, when I’m planning an IB PYP unit of inquiry is, at what level is my class in terms of experience and initiative when it comes to inquiry? In other words, which level of student inquiry will I be planning around – structured inquiry, guided inquiry or open inquiry?

The biggest catastrophe that can happen to a teacher embarking on inquiry for the first time is to implement an open inquiry without fully understanding the level of her students’ independent inquiry skills. There aren’t many children who are new to the IB PYP that have been formally guided through the skills necessary for independent inquiry. This can result in confusion at best and frustration at the worst. Not to mention that moment when you just have to abandon the lesson and re-group. I know this, cos I’ve been there many a time! Haha!

We want to ensure that our inquiries are structured in such a way that will introduce strategies and guide and...

A brand new year is upon us once more! And a  new year is always a good time for self reflection. (I have spoken a lot about reflection within the IB PYP and offered multiple strategies that can be used in previous posts. You can read more about that further on.) But with this post, I’m focusing largely on self-reflection; developing reflective thinking skills within the children and ultimately bringing each child a greater awareness of their own Learner Profile and personal, social and emotional development.

With reflection having been removed from the IB key concepts and student agency being a key focus lately, I felt that there was a need for us to maintain this big idea of reflection throughout our learning environment and certainly within the process of inquiry based learning itself. I wanted my students to be able to understand the importance of reflective thinking and it’s role in self-assessment and the inquiry process, not to mention personal, social and...

Hello dear teachers! I’m excited to share this idea with you. It is really easy to implement and can be done with ANY age level. I call it the INQUIRY JAR. (I know, really imaginative, right?) Let’s get straight to it!

A few posts ago, I wrote about developing inquirers and the three stages that are CRUCIAL to this development; structured inquiry leading to guided inquiry before you finally have independent inquirers.  ( You can link to that article here if you like.) Well, this activity with the Inquiry Jar, is a great way to encourage the inquiry process and model what it looks like and sounds like as well as moving on to teaching higher level thinking skills through questioning and thought analysis. You can find this plus 9 more ideas for bringing inquiry into your classroom in my free guide. It also comes with another great, FREE activity.

Structured...

We hear incredible stories of kids, from schools all around the world, taking action and using their knowledge from inquiry to make an impact for the better. But how much of that action is truly student-led? How big does action have to be? Does it even matter if it isn’t student led? And how do we inspire the children to independently take action? Are those some of the questions that pop into your head when you hear about such wow-factor action? 

Well, never fear…..I’m here to shed some light on the matter and to dispel some of the doubt (and dare I say cynicism?) that may be whispering in your ear. I have an action plan ( and some free tools) to develop and inspire your class of future heroes! Read on…… 
Action, ideally, is the voice of the children. It is student agency at its finest. Action promotes a connection to learning. It’s a transferrable process that, surprise,...

If you think about it; what do you do when you have a question that you have to know the answer to? You go about finding the answer by yourself and NOT because you’re being told to by someone else. You take ACTION towards finding out and, in turn, learning. This is ACTION through participation within your own learning. And this is WHY we applaud student led inquiry. We are empowering our students to take ownership of their learning by acknowledging their curiosity. 

Practising an inquiry based learning  approach in my classroom has been the most meaningful form of teaching I have ever implemented. The authenticity it brings to learning, along with the benefit of increased student agency and connections it makes to 21st century skills, are reasons in themselves for the power of the philosophy. Then, when we add in student engagement  and motivation for learning, it all adds up to a very powerful approach indeed.   Education, as...