If your Wonder Wall is just a pretty bulletin board where students' questions
go to die, you're not alone, but you're missing a golden opportunity.
So often I go into classrooms filled with beautiful displays, anchor charts, and
word walls, and yes, wonder walls too.
But when I ask students often about those questions posted there, they usually say
something like, that's where we put out questions and we don't know something,
or those are the things we wonder about.
But what I never see is what's, or at least what's never visible to
me at least, is where anything ever happens to those questions, and it
takes me back to my floor books.
Because in my classroom I used floor books inspired by Dr. Claire
Warden and you can hear about them in the interview I did with her.
I'll leave a link in the show notes for you to revisit that one, because just
like a Wonder Wall, I would capture children's wonderings, but then those
wonderings would be turned into PLODS or possible lines of development.
They would become anchors for our inquiry and our learning.
Wonder walls should really be similar.
They should be more than just decoration and wallpaper.
They should be the spark, the fuel for deep, authentic learning, but
too often they're just wallpaper.
What's the difference between a wonder wall or a learning
wall you might be thinking.
Well, a wonder wall is really a space for children generated
questions, curiosity questions,
I wonder statements.
A learning wall, on the other hand, is a visual representation
of the learning journey.
It's co-constructed.
It has vocabulary goals, anchor charts, and evidence of understanding.
The problem is that most wonder walls are passive.
Questions go up, nothing comes down.
Kids stopped caring.
The solution, is to activate the Wonder Wall.
To use it as a launchpad for inquiry-based learning, a modeling session, if you
will, to model the inquiry process.
You choose one or two questions a week to explore deeply.
In my interview with Tonya Gilchrist, I'll link to it in the show notes too.
She spoke about exactly how we honor students wonder questions without
going off track and derailing our entire learning process.
Tonya suggested you just choose one or two questions from that Wonder Wall to
explore for a short time every week.
So you put aside some time and you explore and you do a mini inquiry
into one or two of those questions.
But you might be thinking this is a waste of your time.
I've got so much to get through.
But don't forget, inquiry skills are a part of the curriculum.
These wonderings and your modeling and your guided inquiry teaching
is meeting curriculum goals.
To really make Wonder Walls an authentic part of your teaching where
you honor students' curiosity, you really need to make, revisiting those
questions part of your weekly routine.
Reflect with the children on what you've learned and what's still unknown.
Here are some tips for making wonder walls meaningful.
So firstly, I think you have to make them dynamic.
They can't just go there to die.
It's not a graveyard of children's wonderings.
You've gotta move those questions maybe into a different zone,
like an investigation zone.
You've gotta celebrate the questions that you've answered and make sure
that those answers are also displayed.
You know, I think that many of us like our classrooms to feel aesthetically
pleasing, and we often don't like messiness, but learning is messy.
It isn't neat and linear and straightforward.
So find a way that you can display students' answers and the
process of finding out, that suits you and honors your students.
And now that that Wonder Wall isn't just dead wallpaper anymore.
It becomes a living part of learning where children not only have their
curiosity valued, but also fueled.
If you're thinking about what your next inquiry unit should be about, well just
look at your wonder wall for inspiration to plan your next integrated unit of work.
Or it may be that spark for your learning wall.
These are the kinds of topics I talk about in my weekly
newsletter called Get Curious.
If you want to get onto my email list, go to go.bloomingcurious.com/getcurious,
and once you get into that page,
you can see what some of the people on my subscriber list think of the newsletter.
I hope as you go forward this week, you'll look and go over to your
Wonder Wall and take out one or two of those wonderings and turn them into
short guided inquiries to get your children's curiosity juices flowing.
'cause after all, isn't that what learning is really all about?
So, put some time aside and get those curiosity juices flowing and model
to children exactly how you go about looking for answers to questions.
I'll see you next week, same time, same place.
Until then, stay blooming curious, and take care of yourself.