How Can Students Share their Thinking about Writing a Query?

The Query Board

We wanted to find a way for students and teachers to share their thinking as they go through the Query writing process. The result this year is a dedicated bulletin board on which each class can display any types of evidence they might have of this process. It could include chart paper, draft versions, photos, post-it notes, scrap paper, resources that were considered, or anything else. 

This is our Quaker Query bulletin board. It's located in a hallway in the middle of the first floor corridor. It showcases a revolving display of the wonderful steps that classes go through during their query writing journey. It is a place for students or teachers to share the ideas, questions and reflections that occur during each class' process. 

Most of our classroom teachers are familiar with this amazing and challenging collaborative task. In the past it has been the role of our Lower School Quaker Life Committee members to hear about this process, from big ideas to final query, listening to the edits, compromises, sense of the class meetings, and more. 

We felt that it was time to find a way to share these reports with everyone in the community so that we can learn from each other’s approaches to query crafting.  

This month's query and the documentation of the process are below:

January Query

How can we play our part in the never-ending story of trying to make the world a better place?  Is our work ever done?

written by Ms. Tiamiyu and Ms. Bacon's third grade class

Planning for Query Writing

Time	Activity
10 mins	Start by showing: http://vimeo.com/110877004 “Today will be writing the January Query.  We must be mindful of our audience.  Our buddies, PK, 4th graders, teachers from both campuses, family, Friends and friends.” Teachers Says: “Let’s take a look at Queries from this past year and years past” -in color tables students will work together to talk to the page -encourage students to ask if we still have work to do on some of the queries -encourage students to highlight the “question/query” promptsà “how?” “why?”
5 mins	Read:  Quaker Book Wisdom  pg 177 (Family) -have students record on a post-it notes their one word take away
5 mins	January Themes What does January bring?
	-brainstorming queries with color tables -what queries do we have? -what work do we still have to do? -what do we want Friends to focus on in the New Year
10 mins	-bringing our thoughts together to form the query

 

*Thanks to Sarah Tiamiyu and Elizabeth Bacon for allowing me to share their process.