About Me

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Melbourne, VIC, Australia
2nd Grade Teacher at a school in Melbourne, Australia. My job: push kids to think. My passion: helping kids to tackle the life-long skill of searching for meaning, skills, answers and more questions.

Wednesday 11 April 2012

Possibly the biggEST questions...

Welcome to 'When 4th Graders ask the Big questions'.  Here you will find what 9 and 10yr old kidlets ask their teacher when they really want to know something and they are not afraid to ask.  Enjoy.

Let me start by offering these questions that my Year 4 kids posed to me during their first week of the school year.  You may see that I've placed them on what looks suspiciously like a question quadrant.  I just put them on the page randomly at first and I quickly realised that I faced my first CONUNDRUM.

How do you place some of these huge questions on the quadrant?  Sure, "How many wars were there?" is a closed question that you can find in texts like the bible.  Indeed, the 'answers' to several of these questions can be found in the bible or in historical texts.  BUT... where do I place questions like, "Did God have friends?" and "Did God only create the Earth?" Are these imagination questions?  They're certainly more 'open'... can they even be answered?  Thank goodness (or God) for the Open Thinking quadrant methinks.


So... my first blog starts with me facing a challenge.  It starts with my kids posing critical questions about not only the details of the Christian faith, but also the sources of information.  Being handed 'answers' from a Catechism of the Catholic Church won't cut it for these kids... they want to know much more than dogma.


Our Chaplain, Fr Richard, is a LEGEND.  He tells me that it's ok to find 'answers' from many different sources and to give the children exposure to the information available.  My job is to push my kids to think and be critical with information.  This could be a lonnnnnnnnng ride.

1 comment:

Bruce Ferrington said...

El Capitano - this is gold! Keep pushing the limits, the kids respond in amazing and unexpected ways.