Inquiry Learning

“Tell me and I forget, show me and I remember, involve me and I understand.”

Inquiry-based learning is the central way in which we deliver much of the curriculum. Inquiry learning is an approach that encourages children to create new understanding of a topic through exploration, asking questions, making discoveries and testing them out and sharing new learning.

With the development of the information age, particularly through the development and use of Information and Communication Technologies, has brought Inquiry learning into greater focus. With enormous amounts of information now available quickly and cheaply, with multi-media formats such as video together the opportunities created from interactive web-site technologies, an understanding of how to get and make sense of the mass of in formation becomes important.

Kerikeri’s WAGS Model for Inquiry.

Kerikeri Primary has developed a model, or structure to inquiry we call WAGS. (Wags the Dog is our school mascot.) Each letter of WAGS refers to one key phase of our Inquiry learning:

W: Wonderings

A: Asking Questions

G: Gathering Information

S: Sharing

Wonderings refers to exploring and discovering. By immersing in the topic or subject in ways appropriate to age and ability, children explore basic concepts.

Asking Questions forms the basis for further study, and ideally comes from the children themselves as a result of their exploration. Skills of questioning are included here. Questioning refers to both questions and statements.

Gathering information is a very broad stage that includes finding, analysing, selecting and using information relevant to finding answers to questions.

Sharing refers to communicating of outcomes. This would be in a wide variety of child-centred ways, and ideally in a meaningful or ‘authentic’ ways, for example a play, a display, an oral presentation, a booklet for the library etc.