HHHealthy Gardens, Healthy Bodies, Healthy Minds

 

 

An integrated STEM Problem-Based Learning Project, investigating how a school garden can be used to promote healthy bodies and minds while enhancing student inquiry.  Students participated in five "I Wonder" activities (design challenges) to promote student questioning/scientific inquiry.

 

As educators, we were wondering how student inquiry could enhance teaching and learning.  Through our readings of literary articles, we came across the “I Wonder” model.  We felt that this was an approach that could work for our grade 1 and 4 students.  First, we planned a field trip to the pumpkin patch to engage student inquiry.  Before we went, we had students write their wonderings about pumpkins on sticky tabs.  These would serve as our baseline data to measure any progress over the course of the project.  We analyzed student questions under the following categories:  questions, non-questions, # of different questions, questions on task, # higher level questions, and # of questions we already have the answers for.

We quickly realized that students needed to learn the skill of questioning.  We modeled ways to ask questions with the class through teacher modelling and then had them do an “I Wonder” activity with clementines, water and a large jar.  We continued to do “I Wonder” activities throughout the project: broccoli sprout activity, Veggie Rally/Design Challenge and Earth Day Challenge.  We also paired these activities with an interactive Jeopardy game, focusing on each theme to model/improve student questioning.