Hi Carly’s Crew,

Today we went on a field trip to George Jay Elementary school to speak to a kindergarten teacher that has built her entire classroom around inquiry based learning! The teacher’s name was Rebecca Bathurst-Hunt…she is AMAZING!

I left feeling inspired and excited! Especially with our practicum coming up so soon, it was nice to hear from her as she shared her journey with inquiry learning in primary classrooms. It was interesting to hear her talk about her educator heart and it really made me think about what my values as an educator are.

Her classroom is absolutely beautiful! There are a variety of quiet spaces that offer students flexible seating, and provocations for inquiry in every corner. I followed her on Instagram and she will definitely be a major source of inspiration as I begin to create my own classroom one day.

Right now, her students are working on a dinosaur inquiry. Even though dinosaurs aren’t in the curriculum, Rebecca was able to use dinosaurs to make cross-curricular connections and turn into a big project that students are fully immersed in.

My favourite part of Rebecca’s classroom was the wonder wall. It had pictures of all the students with thought bubbles coming out of their heads. Whenever the student has a question or a wonder, they teacher writes in their thought bubble as they work towards answering it. I will definitely want to incorporate this into my own class one day. Sadly, I couldn’t take a picture of it because it had all of the kids’ faces on it!

My biggest take-away from this field trip was that instead of beginning unit plans with a statement, we should begin them with a question that we can ask students. This will encourage student engagement because it is much more fun to have a class discussion rather than just have the teacher ramble on about all of the information. Rebecca shared that we need to provide students with skills and knowledge that is “un-google-able”… we live in an age where we can search the answer to anything in a matter of minutes. As educators we need to teach students the academics but also how to problem-solve and wonder!

We hear so much about inquiry learning and giving students voice, choice and agency in the class but seeing it put into practice gave me a much better understanding of how it all works. I loved everything about our visit to George Jay Elementary School!

See you next week dedicated followers 🙂

Carly