It all started with the kids finding and bringing every rock they found in our playground area to us as if each and every one was the coolest treasure ever found!
They loved scrubbing the dirt off to see the beauty underneath!
Some started bringing in their own precious rock collections to share with the class!
Since we teach based on the students interests, we grabbed on to this opportunity! My amazing student teacher, Miss Abby set up an area with a few rocks for them to document what they see and notice!
Because this group was so interested in the different kinds of rocks, I set up invitations in our Art Area to explore land forms to see if that also sparked any interest!
It definitely did!
I set out magnets for them to explore and see what they notice! They loved sorting the items and exploring how the magnets both attracted and repelled each other!
Miss Abby had them create “Rock Collection Holders” to hold all of the rocks they had been collecting.
We set up an invitation to create “Nature Art” like Andy Goldworthy!
They were definitely inspired by his work!
They created a rock with Miss Abby!
We became scientists and sorted by as many different attributes that we could think of!
We looked closer and documented what we noticed to practice writing informational pieces.
They really loved the geodes so I brought out Agate which are sliced, polished geodes for them to show what they noticed after looking closer using liquid watercolors.
Their Agate art turned out beautiful!
Miss Abby set up some great invitations to explore fossils!
They became paleontologists as they tried to excavate chocolate chips out of a cookie without breaking them! They had to be extra careful since they were fragile like fossils!
Miss Abby did some Land Form projects with those who were interested and created a display.
She also created a display of their fossil exploration.
Another side interest was mythical creatures!
They painted yetis, trolls, Bigfoot….
Mermaids, dragons, unicorns and Pegasus.
This inquiry was totally interest based! We notice that when they write about their interests, they do their best writing and have a huge desire to learn more! Wait until you see where their interests will take us next!