Terry Fox Inquiry

Terry Fox Inquiry (large group and small group)                September 29, 2015      

While grade 3’s were collecting for Terry Fox, the K students became very interested in Terry Fox. They asked a lot of good questions and were interested in pictures and books about him.

Questions:

Ziggy: Where did he sleep every night when he was running?

How did he lose his leg? Did his leg hurt?

We read the book a couple times, and students came up with many more questions and they were very interested in finding out more. We watched a video about his life, answering questions about his leg and the safety vehicle driving behind him. When Zachary became interested in how people without two legs take part in any sports, we watched a sit ski video. Discussion followed, and we looked at a map to see how far he ran in Canada, where the monuments were, and where the water was that he would have dipped his leg into before starting his run.

They decided that they didn’t just want to run one day of the year for Terry Fox, and instead, wanted to run every day to see how long it took them to run the same distance Terry ran every day. They decided they could run every day in the gym, and keep track of how far they ran.

Small Group: Rylee, Easton, Matthew, Zachary

Rylee said that we could keep track with little lines each day, and I showed them how we could keep a tally chart. Zachary said that we could start at 0 and add a little bit each day going across the board, so we talked about the possibility of using a bar graph. Matthew had a similar idea, but described his idea as a “Map” and I asked him to draw it for me so I could understand what he meant. He drew a small diagram of a running route with a starting point for us, as well as an ending point. He said that we could have a ribbon at the end for the winner, and added that to his diagram. He also talked about a safety vehicle behind the runners, and added that to the map. While he was drawing, Easton drew a small diagram using his learning about the map of Canada to track where Terry ran compared to where the monuments are and where we live. The students all liked Matthew’s idea, so I gave him a large piece of paper to recreate his idea for us to use to track our laps. Rylee asked if we could number dots in the corners around the gym, so we would know where to run. She created numbers for 4 dots and taped them on coloured dots to bring to the gym.

They realized that we needed to figure out how many times we had to run around the gym to run the same distance as Terry, so we brought measuring tapes to the gym and put them end to end around the gym floor, and added them together. I told them that Terry ran 42 km each day, and that the measuring tape were each 100 cm (1 meter) long, and that there are 1000 m in 1 km. We figured out that we need to do about 15 laps for each km, so we will track this on the map Matthew created.

On September 30, we did a walk/run in the community that was equal to 1.5 km, so we tracked this on the chart. Some students were tired after each small running portion, so the visual of how little this walk/run was of Terry’s daily run was very interesting to many of them!

I am so interested to see where this goes next!