Professional Documents
Culture Documents
To Inquire Into The Following:: 1. What Is Our Purpose?
To Inquire Into The Following:: 1. What Is Our Purpose?
To Inquire Into The Following:: 1. What Is Our Purpose?
personal histories
histories of individuals
attitudes and attributes of historical figures
3. How might we know what we have learned? 4. How best might we learn?
This column should be used in conjunction with “How best might we learn?” What are the learning experiences suggested by the teacher and/or students to
encourage the students to engage with the inquiries and address the driving
What are the possible ways of assessing students’ prior knowledge and skills? questions?
What evidence will we look for?
* Using Writer’s Workshop students will experience oral story telling with partners
Pre-Assessments: * Students will take personal history questionnaires home and interview their family members.
Class discussion - What is history? Why is important to study biographies? After discussing This will include information about where the family ancestors originated, the origin of the
these questions, students will write in their IB notebooks about why they think these are student’s name, and 5 important events in the student’s life.
important. *Students will interview their parents and record the events that shaped their parent’s lives.
Students will draw a self-portrait and then identify the 3 Learner Profile attributes they need to *Invite Grandparents for lunch and to share the events in their lives.
develop. * Through class discussions, the class will create a chart listing characteristics shared by
*Frontloading – Teacher’s “Me Bag”. Students will view history items to learn about their important historical figures and identify these figures:
teacher. - contributions of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Thurgood Marshall, Cesar Chavez
What are the possible ways of assessing student learning in the context of the lines - state & local figures such as Henrietta King & Barbara Jordan
of inquiry? What evidence will we look for? - inventive pioneers such as Amelia Earhart & Robert Fulton
Formative Assessments: - good citizenship in Florence Nightingale, Paul Revere, & Sojourner Truth
*Students will present a “Me Bag” to the class to show important artifacts from their life. (do we * Students will select a famous person from a list and then create a visual display to describe
still want to do this?) the person’s significant events.
*Student will present to the class about the origin of their name. *Create a class timeline of major events illustrating elapsed time from the dinosaurs to today.
*Students will create a stand up folded timeline (or use Timeliner) of important events in their What opportunities will occur for transdisciplinary skills development and for the
life. development of the attributes of the learner profile?
*Students will choose one important event in their life to write about. They will include the
significance of the event and the effect it has had on their life. Transdisciplinary Skills: This unit is very strong in research and communication skills. The
*Who’s in the Bag – students will explore a bag of artifacts and determine who the person was students have multiple opportunities to grow in these areas. Attitudes: The students will be
and the significance of the artifacts. reflective of their history as well as the history of important figures. Learner Profile: Student will
*Using IIM, students will take notes from biography videos (animated hero) and texts focusing have a better understanding of tolerance and open mindedness from studying individuals that
on important events and the IB Learner Profile and Attitudes of one famous person (ie Harriett have different backgrounds and viewpoints than their own.
Tubman). After collecting notefacts, students will create a product detailing important events in
the person’s life, character traits that led them to their accomplishments, and the IB attributes
and attitude that they best exemplify. Students must include the person’s name, major events in
their life, and their impacts on the world.
How will the classroom environment, local environment, and/or the community be used to facilitate the inquiry?
Guest speakers talk about significant events in their life. A blurb will be put in the Front Page to solicit parent volunteers, Archeologist to share artifacts and the story
6. To what extent did we achieve our purpose? 7. To what extent did we include the elements of the PYP?
Assess the outcome of the inquiry by providing evidence of students’ What were the learning experiences that enabled students to:
understanding of the central idea. The reflections of all teachers involved in the
planning and teaching of the inquiry should be included. develop an understanding of the concepts identified in “What do we want to
learn?”
How you could improve on the assessment task(s) so that you would have a
more accurate picture of each student’s understanding of the central idea. demonstrate the learning and application of particular transdisciplinary skills?
Originally, we had students write about three important events in their life, but we develop particular attributes of the learner profile and/or attitudes?
feel it would be better for them to concentrate on one. We are also going to try to In each case, explain your selection.
spend the first half of the planner focusing on student’s personal histories and the
second half focusing on the history of other people (biographies). This will help the Concepts:
students make personal connections at first and then be able to relate to important
individuals. The changes we made this year really did help. But we need to make Causation: Students interviewed their family to find out about their family history and
sure that we add in a task where the students write about one event in their life. how they came to the point they are today.
Connection: Students made natural connections to their classmates and historical
figures they studied through the myriad of activities.
What was the evidence that connections were made between the central idea
Perspective: After hearing about their classmate’s histories and reading about important
and the transdisciplinary theme? figure’s histories, students were able to understand and appreciate reasons for
During researching individuals throughout history, students were really able to focus differences among individuals.
on the events which occurred in people’s lives. The students didn’t focus so much Reflection: Students wrote about one event in their life and how it has affected on them.
on the facts of the individual’s lives, but more on the event which shaped their lives
and the lives of others. Skills:
Research: Students used a variety of resources to extract information and take notes
about the important information.
Communication: Students will take notes, write a report, and then orally present their
project to the class. Classmates will observe and take notes about what they heard.
At this point teachers should go back to box 2 “What do we want to learn?” and
highlight the teacher questions/provocations that were most effective in driving the
inquiries.