Learning Styles through an Inquiry-Based Approach

In early September, kindergarten teachers and parents noticed that children were very curious about rocks. Pockets and cubbies swelled with personal collections from the playground, the park, and other nearby outdoor places. Rocks and pebbles were exchanged like gifts, and crystals and fossils soon became classroom currency. As they played, the children began to invent and develop a descriptive rock vocabulary to more clearly differentiate and communicate obvious and subtle differences. There were the sparkly ones, the marking ones, the volcanic ones, the ones that look like metal, the fossils, and the crystals. Then there were the kind that came from the fairies and even the ones from the moon. Children asked each other questions based on their observations: How did you get that to be so sparkly? How do you think this rock was made? Where did you find that one? Thinking together in these ways helps children build deeper understandings and allows them to develop a scaf-fold on which to build more meaningful connections. By listening carefully to children as they ask questions and talk together, teachers can incorporate children’s questions and interests into an inquiry-based curriculum that supports various types of learners. What is inquiry-based learning? Inquiry—investigating to gather information—is a part of human behavior from the moment we are born. Infants use all their senses—seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling—to explore and to collect information. Babies observe and turn toward faces, grasp at objects to put in their mouths, and follow objects with their eyes, all to gain more information (Thornton 2003). When a toddler repeat-edly drops a ball into a tube and watches it vanish, he exhib-its delight each time the ball disappears and then reappears somewhere else. It is as though he is wondering, "Will it Uchenna Ogu an