Wow! Inquiry can stress out my brain! I know I am the type of person that seeks information daily. Today in my classroom I pulled up a map of Cuba (we’re reading Old Man and the Sea). I also used Google images to show a skiff (fishing boat). Yesterday I used my smart-phone to check my driving directions with Google Maps. It doesn’t seem like a day goes by that I don’t find out about something either for my personal life or for my teaching life. (Not to mention my student life…)
However, despite my comfort with inquiry this project gave me some anxiety. Here is a little break-down of my first few ideas before I landed on bread baking.
Oooh, I can use anything I want! That’s awesome! I do love roller derby; it’s the greatest workout/sport I’ve ever tried. I wonder if I could do my project related to roller derby? Hmm… I’m not really sure what I need to find out about roller derby that I don’t already know. I mean, I’m learning kinesthetically and gaining endurance, but for this project maybe I need to move on to different idea.
I explored some of the examples, It’s hard to find the simple answers sometimes because the last entry is first and it relies on the knowledge of the previous entries. I skim around these a while. Some that I liked were about food. Eating local is something I am passionate about that was a topic that I seriously considered.
A lot of other students wrote about redesigning a garden or yard space. This didn’t inspire me much.
As I was pondering all this I was also thinking about how to make my Sunday most productive. I was considering trying (again) to bake some bread. The first time my results were so-so. Since then I’ve found one resource I like a lot, http://www.farmgirlfare.com/. The author has some bread tips. The more I read the more I realized this would not be one of my quick Google searches that leaves me quickly satisfied and on my way. This would be a much larger and more in depth endeavor. Then it dawned on me: I may not have time to make bread today because I’m going to use it for my Inquiry Project (which I needed to start) and it’s going to require a lot more inquiry.
And that is the rambling story of how my blog/project/inquiry got started.
(Now that I’m writing about it more ideas are coming to mind: dog training, fishing (another unsuccessful endeavor this previous summer. But, I’m sticking with bread. )
