Grade 4 - Finding Out

In Grade 4, we have started to turn our wall into a giant display of the inquiry cycle with some of the students' work for each phase.  

Now, we are working on "Finding Out" about some of the questions that we have formulated.  The first one was "Is it always good to succeed and bad to fail?"  For a resource we used the book, The Girl Who Never Made Mistakes.  By hearing her story and how she responded positively to her failure, we learned that being worried about mistakes can also stop you from being a risk-taker and trying new things.  It's better to try and learn from mistakes because the more things you try out, the more you can learn and happiness you can find.  

We also started to find out about our second question, "How does our brain work?" since we thought that thinking is such an important part of success, challenge and failure.  To research this we watched a video about "The Learning Brain" that taught us about how neurons and pathways work when we are learning.  Everyone was very interested in seeing microscopic images of the neurons and pathways in an animal that was in a cage compared with an animal that had companions and friends, as well as a newborn baby growing into a two year old.