A Place for Wonder

A Place for Wonder, Reading and Writing Nonfiction in the Primary Grades, explores the importance of classrooms that encourage curiosity and discovery. What seems like such a simple thing can be easily overlooked if teachers don't consciously provide a place for exploration and wonder as well as integrating habitudes of curiosity into their curriculum.

What I liked about this book, was that it wasn't simply a "how-to" recipe for teaching nonfiction. Don't get me wrong, the lessons, directions and artifact photos are there for you to use and implement in your own classroom, but there is also a lot of thoughts between Georgia and Jennifer about how they came to their ideas and decisions. Reading their after-lesson reflections was what made their work even more powerful. It really helped me understand and visualize their classroom work.

Curiosity and wonder seems like a natural fit for science lessons, but I really would like to see more of it infused in lessons across the curriculum and through the grades. Georgia and Jennifer aren't the only ones talking about teaching curiosity. A recent blog post by Angela Maiers shows her conversation with literacy coaches about looking for evidence of curiosity in classrooms.

Do you have a classroom environment that supports curiosity? What kinds of things do you do?