Objective:
To encourage students to wonder and ask questions about the unit topics before, during and after their reading.
Materials:
Notebooks, pencils, posterboard, markers
Procedure:
1) After briefly introducing a subtopic of the unit (i.e., the Tuareg) and allowing students to browse through relevant books and magazines, ask them to pair up and talk together about the subject for 5 minutes. Following this, the students share their ideas with the larger group.
2) The teacher then distributes the inquiry notebooks to each student saying, "I'm sure you have been wondering about many of the ideas we have been talking about and you have some questions about what you have seen in the books and magazines that you have been browsing through. Now I want you to write those questions down in this notebook.
3) The teacher can suggest such sentence starters as:
I wonder why
I still don't understand
What if
What would happen if
Is it really true that
How did this affect
Can this be compared to
What did other people think about this
4) The teacher then collects the notebooks and writes the students' questions and wonderings on large poster-board, to be used in discussion after a particular reading or as topics for student research.
(This lesson was adapted from Laura Robb's lesson on p. 75)
