Developing our questioning skills:

Today we continued to develop our research and gathering information skills.  In particular we focused on creating sound research questions.

The children worked in buddies to develop a set of solid research questions which would help them gather enough relevant information to create an information brochure about energy efficient homes- the focus of our inquiry this term.

First we looked at the title of the task "energy efficiency housing".

Next we discussed how the title could be broken into two research paths " energy efficiency" and "housing". This gave us two clear directions for our questioning.

Lastly we created a set of questions with these two focuses.

This process of really breaking the task into specific pathways is a very helpful way of exploring a subject or statement in depth. It also helps the children to understand what direction their research needs to take.