Teaching Fourth- and Fifth-Grade Students to Read the Land through an Inquiry-Oriented Community Tour

Teacher practices created experiences for students to guide their inquiry by creating opportunities to gather data through field notes. Students examined their county and gathered data from the field on a daylong investigation of their county. Students generated questions and considered their observations at multiple stops. Students learned to take field notes through drawing, gathering evidence from the landscape, and recording both facts and interpretations from the experience. Students considered movement, human interaction with the environment, and time both as continuity and as change.