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The students collaboratively determine what the goal would be for their final products in the Natural Resources Inquiry in response to the Inquiry question, "How should we use the natural resources of the United States?" The common class goal was to stop wasting water, and students decided whether they would work independently or in groups for how they would take action to accomplish this goal. Pictured are some of students' Inquiry Challenge Statements, and Product Plans from Module 6 brainstorming lesson "Brainstorm: Generating Ideas for the Work."

Every year students present their Native American Cultural Area Museum Exhibits: students build, mold, draw, analyze, and create awesome projects to share based on their role in the group. There is a shelter diorama, story analysis, artifact analysis, food samples presentation, artwork presentation or inspired artwork creation, and clothing presentations for each of the cultural areas. Students are placed in their groups and they then decide who is going to take on which role, so it is an amazing project for student choice and demonstrating mastery in multiple ways.

After the election, our fifth graders were disheartened by the low voter turnout at the local, state, and national levels. To address this, we integrated our writing unit with the inquiry project, creating brochures to emphasize the importance of participating in elections at every level.

We thought of something that has multiple parts that work together to make something. Our class came up with a rainbow, and each color had a group of 3 or 4 students work together to design the part of the rainbow. Each color represented something that we learned about teamwork: strengths, sharing, kindness, collaboration, etc. The students got to choose what materials to use and how to show what they learned.

We learned about all kinds of families and what makes our family special. We did the Vin Diagram as a group. We than build our "family" home with all its members and shared with each other. They saw graphically the similarities and differences by comparing the color codes on each house.

To get the kids curious ahead of the Economic unit, I created this wall display. They are so inquisitive and can't wait to see what this unit will be about! I am excited to see what they will come up with as we begin!

This wall displays shows student work from the Our State and Region.

During the month of January and February, we studied the Civil Rights Movements and we celebrated African-American History.

The first grade team worked on symbols that represented our school community. They included a MAP key to help the reader's understand the school "map."

My students loved this project! Each student explained a holiday that their family celebrates and some of the traditions they participate in. Highly recommend!

The students chose an artifact from the cultural area that they researched and made a replica out of clay, wood, paint and other materials. In order to inspire and educate our broader community, these replicas were displayed at our local library along with a photograph of the original artifact and information about the cultures of origin. We heard such positive feedback from the library on the interaction of the community with the projects-looking, reading and learning from the student writing and the maps and images included alongside the student work. Having an authentic audience was important to creating quality work.

Students created a museum display on the importance of elections based on the Rights and Responsibilities unit in fifth grade. We considered information like the structure of government and how they solve problems, as well as a citizen's right to vote and what they can do to go above and beyond that right.