Inquire and Explore

As promised, I will be covering another chapter today, Chapter 5. This chapter is all about having the students inquire and explore. Gallagher starts by quoting the National Commission on Writing where they say that students need to double the amount of writing that they're doing, because right now, it's just not enough. Not only do we want kids to write because we as teachers want to know how much they know and how much they don't know, but Gallagher says that writing will often lead to ideas that we didn't even know we had. Through writing, we can use our imaginations in a creative fictional or nonfictional way. By limiting the writing we have kids do, we limit their creative process.

One of the best tests for this theory is to take a difficult passage, say from Dante's Inferno, and read it. Then give yourself a rating from 1-10 on how well you understood the piece. Read the same passage again, then rate your self a second time. Lastly, write the passage out (copy word for word), then rate yourself a third time. "If your score in the 3rd box is higher than your previous scores, you have discovered that the act of writing somehow deepened your level of comprehension. Being asked to commit words to a page generated new thinking." (pp 117) It is important to note, however, that there are different types of writing, and each type can deepen understanding in its own way.

Idiom Explorations (pp 124) Start by giving kids 4 options (a - d) of how the idiom "kick the bucket" started. Have them guess the correct answer. Once you go through a couple of idioms, you have kids think of their favorite, and write an origin story for it. You can find the true answers at the following wesites:
http://www.fun-with-words.com/etymology.html
http://www.etymonline.com/
http://www.redgage.com/blogs/sneaggles/etymology-of-idioms.html
You can also expand this lesson to include origin stories for other things more specific to your unit, such as the origins of books, soccer, political movements, etc.

Rumor Has It (pp 127) Similar to the one above, you can visit http://snopes.com/ to find out the truth about circulating rumors, such as Disneyland used to deny admittance to long-haired guests. You can use these examples to create origin stories as well.

What the Future Holds (pp 129) The last one I really like from this chapter has kids think about a unit topic, for example How the Media Affects Us, then explore a sub area of that topic, such as violent video games makes kids violent. You then ask the kids to think about what the core issue is of the topic, and creatively write about what the future might hold if this problem isn't solved. Some other topic areas might be careers, transportation, crime, pollution, housing, religion, etc.

In closing, the main idea behind this chapter is to continue feeding kids intellectual curiosity, even if they are older. Once kids stop wanting to explore is the day I want to stop teaching. It is important to keep their creative juices flowing so that the world can continue to be a better place. Essentially, you are teaching the underlying value of understanding the way things work to provoke some kind of change.