This resource shows teachers how to introduce inquiry incrementally, systematically, and successfully within preschool and primary classrooms, deepening and extending children's natural curiosity.
Why Are School Buses Always Yellow?: Teaching for Inquiry, PreK-3 demonstrates how to assist children creatively and strategically in their quests for answers and how to develop the inquiry process in young minds. Practitioners will discover how to use inquiry as a technique for teaching mandated content in a way that makes learning relevant, rigorous, and durable for students. Using examples from real classrooms, the book shows teachers how to connect inquiry to required content while still moving students toward more control of their own learning. Teachers can help even the youngest students to reform their initial playful, tangential, or shallow questions to deeper questions about content. As teachers develop inquiry-based units that incorporate students' queries and challenge them to become good questioners early in their educational experience, learners will develop thinking skills that will serve them throughout school.