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!
