Integrated Inquiry Approach

For the first part of the term,  our inquiry topic has been focussed on animals and being a responsible pet owner. I integrated maths, reading, writing, inquiry, technology and art as to maximise the amount of learning that could occur in the short time that we were given.

I was amazed by how much content we covered and how much the students learnt. My reading books aligned directly with the inquiry science lessons, where we investigated classification, adaptation and the food chain. I ensured that my students were engaging with multimodal text types each week and that we read a few texts that covered the topic in depth. I found that these reading lessons were very successful; the students made connections between their prior knowledge/ learning and between the texts.This aligned with a wide and deep reading approach, which Glenbrae and other Manaiakalani schools are focusing on at the moment.

                                                       Reading

In writing we investigated and wrote about responsible pet care, writing reports and letters about this. While we worked on addition and subtraction questions around buying items for our pets and visiting the vets in maths. The students were given technological challenges to create items that would support farmers and as a create activity for writing, my year six students created dioramas to illustrate the different environments that pets live in.

Creating dioramas to illustrate an animals habitat.

We are now looking at some of the big issues around animals, such as factory farming and animal testing, as part of our personal lines of inquiry and class sessions. These are promoting great discussion and debate. The students will be responding to these issues this week through poetry, to end our inquiry.

Overall, I feel I have learnt a lot from teaching this unit. This is the first time I have attempted to integrate as many subjects and it is something that I will definitely be doing again.