Getting there!

I spent another couple of hours in my new room/school today but unfortunately, had to bring my 2 sons with me. You an imagine how little I actually got done. I am in training tomorrow all day and only have 2 more days in the classroom until the students arrive on Tuesday! I am getting some things together for us to do the first week. Some of my plans include:
*All About Me poster
*Classroom Scavenger Hunt
*Welcome to 2nd Grade/3rd Grade colouring pages {found on TPT}
*Measuring and graphing our heights on the first day of school {to be repeated on the last day}
*Math Interest Survey|
*Math Games
*Cooperative Games in gym

I am working on creating an inquiry-based classroom, particularly in Science, incorporating lots of open-ended questions for Math and some more independent study in Social Studies. Our first Science unit will be Properties of Matter and I found an amazing inquiry-based unit {over 400 pages!} for elementary school.

The idea behind inquiry-based learning is that a broad question/problem is presented to the class. There is lots of discussion about possible outcomes, solutions, strategies, and procedures about how we can find out the answer. The students are able to create their own responses/experiments. Each question may take anywhere from one to several classes to get it done.

Our first question/problem in our unit is going to be "What happens to the M&M coating when it sits in water". I saw inquiry-based learning happening in the classroom next to me last year and what I observed was nothing short of amazing. The students were SO engaged and excited about what they were learning. I am super excited to be doing this with my students!

I still have plenty to do in order to be ready for next week and I still don't have a real schedule so I can't do a day plan, but I know it will all work out in the end.