Curriculum and Personal Connections

Curriculum Connections
Any type of inquiry project is going to meet some standards in all of the content areas. Like Annette says, "Everything can be connected in some way." Some of the standards met in 6th grade Language Arts include:

Reading: Analysis of Nonfiction and Informational Text 6.2.4

Writing: Process and Features
Organization and Focus 6.4.1-6.4.4
Research Peocess and Technology 6.4.5-6.4.7
Evaluationa and Reflection 6.4.8-6.4.10

Writing: Research Application 6.5.3

And depending on whether or not an oral presentation was involved-

Listening and Speaking:
Organization and Delivery of Oral Communications 6.7.4-6.7.7
Applications 6.7.11-6.7.14, 6.7.17

Personal Connections
Our corporation was part of the Purdue Project Based Learning Collaborative several years ago, so several of the teachers in my building have been using this approach for awhile. I know that some people don't agree that PBL is inquiry, but it CAN be if you build it around a question that doesn't have a single answer and that's approach we took. We were trained by working through the process just like we have throughout this blog - only we worked in groups. As a result of this training, in addition to developing several PBLs, several of us revamped our "research project" assignments into inquiries. Since it's been awhile, it's been good for me to work through this again. It's refreshed my memory and given me some new ideas - I especially like Rankin's Pre-search.