Research Skills -Create a Global Christmas Village Inquiry for Little Kids

Bring research skills into practice for your lower grades with this highly-engaging, concept based activity that is perfect for any IB PYP or inquiry-based classroom. You have EVERYTHING (map, images, text, graphic organisers) you need in this complete research based inquiry project to explicitly teach the fundamental research skills and enable student agency as the children are learning collaboratively. It ends with a fun, eye-catching display of traditional global Christmas characters that the children select for themselves based on interest. Win-win!

Designed for grades 1-3. UK & USA spelling included.

You will find learning experiences to bring opportunities for explicit teaching and lots of implicit practice for:

•critical thinking

•data analysis

•conceptual thinking

•observation

•hypothesising

•reading for information

•identifying key details

•formulating questions

•basic note-taking

•collaboration and more!

It is all covered within this high-engagement inquiry-based learning activity that gets the kids involved in applying their Approaches to Learning skills, integrating maths and reading as they learn about different Christmas traditions & celebrations around the world. It is super easy to implement and perfect for a multi-day project, usually lasting 3-5 days. The objective is to build a global village of characters. Kids LOVE this activity! It is SO engaging!

It requires the children to apply their skills to:

• work collaboratively

•make decisions

•think critically

•solve problems

•hands on inquiry

•Self/peer assessment

It was designed to be used as part of collaborative learning and inclusive assessment experience, however it can absolutely be used for independent work too. It is SO engaging with differentiated versions so you can pick and choose the pages to suit your group of learners.

Provoke wonder with Guided Inquiry!

In groups, the children will decide which characters they would like to explore further using the pictures and text to provoke curiosity and frontload information that invites wonder.

Give them the options. Allow them to choose. Embrace this agency.

With a selection of graphic organisers to support the sub-skills within SEE-THINK-WONDER, basic note-taking and reading for information. This enables differentiation, allows struggle to be part of the process, builds upon that collaborative thinking aspect.

Groups can self/peer assess their own work or you can work with them for this. They will then colour their global characters, find out more about the traditions of the country in question and create their global village on their desks. It's a fantastic way to enjoy the Christmas holiday with math!

You can find many more inquiry based learning tools for little ones in the collection here in my store and on my blog below

Enjoy!

Susan Powers