INQUIRY TERM 3

For Explore this term we have read lots of stories and watched movies with strong value themes. From these children have been able to relate to things characters have done or make suggestions on how they would have done things differently based on values. To get started we first needed to investigate the word VALUE. To do this we used a compare and contrast map to expolore the differences between the meanings of"valuable" and "value" as well as drawing out similarities. The children needed lots of prompting and explanation to build up prior knowledge before we could complete this effectively. The children then were able to describe that "valuable" has more to do with tangable things like, money, friends, toys etc. They then established the idea that "values" come from within and are displayed in the way we act or feel. We moved onto the question "How do values make us who we are". To do this we reflected back on the stories we had read like " The Little Red Hen" " The Ant and the Grasshoppers" and " The Engine that Could". We talked about the attitudes, actions, and feelings of each character then related the obvious characteristics to some well know valuse like: Care, Consideration, Courtesty, Hard Working, Paitence as well as discussing new values like: Persisitance, Resilience, Faith, Participation. To find information at this stage the children found lots of discussion about personal experiences and opinions most helpful for understanding. Some children even sugguested using a dictionary to help us with definitions. Other children sugguested other stories we could read with similar themes like "Are You My Mother". One student suggested a MacDonalds add and I also sourced some other adds on youtube that displayed values helpful for a deeper understanding of our new values. The children really benefited when we used story writing to describe a character and give examples of values they used in the stories. I found that they were reall able to demostrate a practical knowledge of their understanding and relate it to their own lives. I had decided to pose the questions to the children this term so we could focus on gathering information and presenting. Our question was " How can I use values to get better at something". We used describe maps to draw out information to answer questions like "how do we know we are good at something" " how do we know we are not good at something". We could then start discussing how we could use the values we had disucssed as actions to get better at something we know we need more practice at. To draw an even deeper understanding of each value we did lots of role play in real life situations when we are learning something new and how we cope with the challenges we face. We used the digital camera to record some of these situations and matched them to our values posted on the wall. I found this exercise most valuable. For Presenting our challenge has been to learn how to use the program Comic Life.