Science is fun. Science is curiosity. We all have natural curiosity. Science is a process of investigating. It’s posing questions and coming up with a method. It’s delving in.
If you’ve been following my #28daysofwriting, you’ll know that my theme for this week is Student Motivation. Last blog, I wrote about challenge. In this entry, I’ll focus on ‘curiosity’.
Any Aussies remember this classic 80’s show? I loved The Curiosity Show. I was a fiend for random facts. In fact (pun intended), I drove my parents mad for most of 1987 with a fact book I bought with my pocket money. I’m pretty sure that fact book “went missing” quite soon after a long family road trip in which I insisted on reading every fact aloud to the entire car.
This term, our Integrated Inquiry unit for Stage 3 is entitled the Ministry of Science. You can read about the ins and the outs of this inquiry here.
One aspect that I love about this inquiry is that we incorporate Christian Studies into our chats about science. Often, these two learning areas are in conflict but our team welcomed the challenge of finding some sort of harmony between the two. I’ve found that when students are encouraged to question the universe’s beginning and size, it fuels a deep curiosity.
One way we’ve been doing this is through the work of Louie Giglio and his Indescribable series. I played a 7-minute clip from this in class yesterday and the curious response was… well… indescribable. Students couldn’t wait to ask about how big the universe is and whether there’s life on other planets and the speed of light, etc.
Then, this is my favourite part, my students then continued this discussion on Edmodo.
How do you know that you’ve developed curiosity in your students?
They can’t stop talking/researching/writing about that “thing”.
BTW If you want to read a rad post about researching, here’s a helpful link.
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