An Inquiry on Magical Creatures: Interest Based Learning

One way that I get my students to be excited about learning and using their emerging academic skills is by teaching through their interests. Sometimes it might be a small area set up for a small group who is interested in a topic and sometimes it is a whole inquiry involving all of us and our classroom environment. This group has been showing their love of unicorns, dragons and mermaids since the beginning of the year! Now that we are back to face to face learning, I was able to take this interest and use it!

Earlier in the year when we were face to face for a few weeks, I had these Story-Telling Bins for them to explore and create stories. They were a favorite!

After a few weeks of going back to online learning, we were able to come back. I took everything from those story bins and set up and area where they could use the magical creatures together in the stories. Oral story telling is an important skill that will help them in writing. It also builds vocabulary and allows them to build their creative thinking skills and use their imagination! Later, I will add story booklets to encourage them to write the stories they play!

I set up an area to inspire them to write stories about their favorite magical creatures. We have been working on writing sentences and how a story is organized with a beginning, middle and end. Here, they can practice those skills writing about something they were interested in! 



The library was filled with books about magical creatures and some fairytales to encourage reading for pleasure and to inspire their own stories!



I put the scarves in our Dramatic Play Area with some clothes pins so they could create costumes and become magical creatures. 





They could hone their creative thinking skills in the art area! 





They experimented with colored vinegar and baking soda to create dragon breath!

You can’t investigate unicorns without exploring rainbows! We used prisms, CD’s and a flashlight!

They also practiced making all the colors of the rainbow and their different shades using only primary colors.

We used magical creatures to practice creating number stories and solving addition problems.

We also explored real dragons that live in our world and did some informational writing as they wrote a fact about their favorite one!

Here are some other math and literacy experiences they had this week! Bang is a favorite game to practice reading sight words. They pick a card and read it. Then they choose if they want to draw again. If they get a BANG card, they have to put all their cards back! Whoever has the most cards at the end wins!



They practiced reading cvc words by trying to match their word cups to the picture cups. These came from @real_learners_play’s TPT store.



They sorted by beginning sound.



And practiced sight words with play dough and tracing the letters in Himalayan sea salt! It’s a great sensory experience! 



We have also been practicing adding and subtracting using our new Math Racks.

We will continue our Magical Creature Inquiry into next week! Stay tuned to see what else we come up with as we follow this interest! Meanwhile, I leave you with this thought: