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Built on a collection of 40,000+ popular, high-quality books from 250+ of the world's best publishers, Epic safely fuels curiosity and reading confidence for kids 12 and under.

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online access fun thousands children great kids ebooks books

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What is a scientist Book Collection on Epic

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Built on a collection of 40,000+ popular, high-quality books from 250+ of the world's best publishers, Epic safely fuels curiosity and reading confidence for kids 12 and under. Get Started

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Essential Question: What is a Scientist?

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Think Like a Scientist Video and Activity (2:38)

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Think Like a Scientist Video and Activity (2:38)

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Observe, hypothesize, experiment, report, and analyze as you sing and dance to this scienteriffic song!

Guided Dance Blazer Fresh Science Kindergarten 1st Grade 2nd Grade 3rd Grade 4th Grade 5th Grade Body Awareness Gross Motor Skills Coordination Pop 'N' Bop S.T.E.M. L.A.B.

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Powered by Observe, hypothesize, experiment, report, and analyze as you sing and dance to this scienteriffic song! Guided Dance Blazer Fresh Science Kindergarten 1st Grade 2nd Grade 3rd Grade 4th Grade 5th Grade Body Awareness Gross Motor Skills Coordination Pop 'N' Bop S.T.E.M. L.A.B.

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Mary Had A Little Lab - Science Books for Kids Read Aloud

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Grade Level NGS Unit Anchoring Phenomenon 

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Creating a wonder wall is a great tool to use in inquiry to build a space where students can

get students thinking

share their learning throughout their inquiry

keep ideas concepts and questions visible

interact with others

share standards, learning goals, and assessment criteria

share evidence of learning

This post is part 1 in my inquiry series. To learn more about inquiry click through to see my many other posts about inquiry. If you are new to my blog, consider starting here with my post on planning for inquiry-based learning!

Also, why not connect and stay up to date on all things inquiry by joining my teaching with inquiry facebook group.

What's a Wonder Wall?

Wonder wall boards are built at the beginning of a unit and are kept alive throughout student learning. These are living examples of student learning throughout the unit.

Begin building this board when you provoke students to think about the topic you will be studying. Students will look at artifacts and ask questions about what they are seeing. They activate prior knowledge and share this with others in a knowledge building circle.

Type of Display Board

This is an example of the board that I use for my wonder wall. It is a trifold board. One side is for my fourth graders and the other side for my fifth graders.

Sometimes I use these trifold boards and other times I just use my bulletin boards but this is great if you are lacking wall space and it also works to move around the classroom for students to use when you are working with them.

Artifacts

I use artifacts to help provoke conversations and interests in a topic at the beginning of a unit. Artifacts can be many things

Most of the time I use pictures that I print out in colour. Especially if I don't have access to real-life objects.

If I have easily accessible artifacts like my rock collection or some small appliances from home I might use those as well.

The Role of Questions

Using a wonder wall at the beginning of an inquiry unit means that you provoke students to think about a topic. Providing them with artifacts gets them thinking.

Now, having them ask questions is the next step. If you are struggling with getting your students asking the right questions, check out my post on Asking Questions.

Students will take sticky notes and ask questions about what they see. Use these doodle notes in my free resource library to help your students keep track of what they are thinking.

As students share their background knowledge and their questions the board is built. These questions are the driving force behind your learning.

Group their questions into themes, use them to develop learning goals and success criteria, and to find gaps in their knowledge that may require a teacher-directed lesson to fill.

Put student questions beside the artifact or picture on the wonder wall, and throughout the learning strive to answer these questions and keep track of unanswered questions.

It is through student questions that learning is constructed.

Lessons Learned

Another thing I learned while implementing my wonder wall is that when students ask questions I really really want to answer them! I want to share my knowledge and have them soak it all in and teach them something. I am a teacher!! this is what I do!! I know stuff and teach about it!! STOP STOP STOP. I had to get myself to stop!

This was not what inquiry was about. Sure, I am a teacher, but I am not as powerful or as knowledgeable as Google. I mentally needed to stop myself and concentrate on not answering their questions but to ask them to add their questions to the Wonder Wall and allow them to figure out the answers for themselves.

I knew that I was going to lead them through my lessons to these answers but I needed to stop just giving them the information. They would now have to start working for this information because I was not going to give them an easy way out.

Sure later on in the unit, we would have a discussion on certain topics and I would explain different concepts to them. BUT we did this together. I was not teaching them I was facilitating their learning.

Giving them the tools to let them find the answers to their questions on their own.

Results

And you know what...a funny thing happened.

They started learning faster than I had expected.

My students took those questions home and found out the answers to them. They would read books during independent time and find the answers to our questions. They were discussing these things with their parents at home.

It was amazing to see how excited they were about learning these concepts which in turn also allowed our discussion at school to become more vibrant and engaging.

Sure there were times when a teacher-directed lesson was necessary, especially in the technical aspects of the units. But overall it was great to see them apply their learning in new and interesting ways.

If you would like to see how I made my Wonder Wall for these units check out my video below

I now include wonder wall cards in most of my units to help teachers get started with artifacts for students and teachers to use as a provocation to get started with the units that they are teaching. If you are interested in the cards that were used for the wonder wall on the video you can get them in the two units below.

Learn more about inquiry. Next up in my inquiry series

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Creating a wonder wall is a great tool to use in inquiry to build a space where students can get students thinking share their learning throughout their inquiry keep ideas concepts and questions visible interact with others share standards, learning goals, and assessment criteria share evidence of learning This post is part 1 in my inquiry series.

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This site is a curated collection of science phenomena for the NGSS, along with phenomenon based learning resources and help for how to use phenomenon to drive student questions in the classroom centered around 3 dimensional teaching and learning.

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EPIC Collection - What do Scientists do?

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EPIC Collection - What do Scientists do?

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Built on a collection of 40,000+ popular, high-quality books from 250+ of the world's best publishers, Epic safely fuels curiosity and reading confidence for kids 12 and under.

Get Started

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
online access fun thousands children great kids ebooks books

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What do scientists do Book Collection on Epic

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Built on a collection of 40,000+ popular, high-quality books from 250+ of the world's best publishers, Epic safely fuels curiosity and reading confidence for kids 12 and under. Get Started

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drawings -What does a scientist look like?

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Notebook cover examples

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The Wonder of Science website aggregates the work of Paul Andersen around the NGSS (Next Generation Science Standards)

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Welcome to the SDCOE Science Resource Center

The San Diego County Office of Education Science Resource Center has been developed to guide educators as they implement the California Next Generation Science Standards (CA NGSS). This website contains information about the three dimensions of the standards, searchable versions of the CA NGSS Performance Expectations, descriptions of the various K-12 course models for CA NGSS, a framework for planning and monitoring quality science programs, and other tools to support professional learning in science.

Provide Feedback on CA NGSS in Spanish

The documents below are draft versions of the CA NGSS in Spanish and may contain errors in spelling, grammer, and/or phrasing. They are provided to gather public feedback. Please complete the CA NGSS in Spanish Feedback Form to help make this resource as accurate as possible.

To aid in the review and feedback process, the performance expectations documents are organized by Disciplinary Core Idea. They are not in final form or organization.

Classroom Posters for the SEPs and CCCs Available
Use the Science Icon Posters order form to purchase a set of these posters for your classroom or school.

Updates and revisions to the SDCOE Resource Center have been funded partially through the Standards Implementation Project and made possible by a collaboration between CCSESA, the California Department of Education, the State Board of Education, and the S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation.

contact us

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Home - San Diego County Office of Education

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Home - SDCOE serves our county's most vulnerable students and supports school leaders, teachers, and students across the county.