Memories of a kindergarten North Pole inquiry: “What is life like for elves at the North Pole?”

With anticipation building as the winter break approached, students became elves who made toys, baked cookies, looked after reindeer, and delivered gifts on sleighs. This inquiry led to amazing opportunities for students to be leaders and develop creativity, innovation, problem-solving, and collaboration skills. Cross-curricular connections to math (measurement), language, science, and art.

Read about our memories below, including reflections on how inquiry-based learning lends itself to development of 21st century skills.

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Memories of a North Pole inquiry: “What is life like for elves at the North Pole?”

As the winter break approached, students in our class were full of wonder about Santa, elves, and the North Pole. Everyone in our class celebrated Christmas, and they were excited to talk about their thoughts and ideas, so we encouraged this creative thinking and began a new and particularly imaginative inquiry!

Our plans and our play all centred around what the students already knew - or what they learned from our collection of library books - about the North Pole.

Indoors and outdoors, the students were elves who made toys. We learned from one book that the North Pole has a “cookie kitchen”, so we turned the playdough area into our cookie kitchen and also baked real cookies together - focusing on procedural writing, and cookie math (various number sense activities). Another area of our classroom became a place for scientist elves to do ‘kitchen experiments’ with baking ingredients like oil, water, vinegar, salt, baking soda, and food colouring.

One student suggested we ought to have reindeer to look after and to ride on because North Pole elves look after the reindeer. She organized a group to collect sticks outside, design a plan to build a reindeer, and build it together. She thought it was important to teach the class how to compare the lengths of sticks they’d collected by measuring them - so she independently taught the whole class to measure using a metre stick. This led to lots of students wanting to measure everything they could! The same student planned the collaborative reindeer-building project and her team built a reindeer entirely independently, including resolving all conflicts on their own; the only support from educators was to help with duct-taping. What amazing leadership and collaboration!

Another team worked on building a sleigh from Lego, because gifts from the North Pole are delivered by Santa’s sleigh. Their goal was to be able to transport a stack of gift boxes all the way across the classroom. They boxes consistently toppled, but the team continued modifying their plans until they were successful. Again, the educators stood back and watched the collaboration, innovation, creativity, and problem-solving in action. Every time the team tested a new sleigh design, they took turns transporting gift boxes across the classroom, measuring with chairs the distance travelled each time the boxes toppled to determine which design was most successful. There was an enormous celebration when the final design transported the boxes all the way!

The question was asked, “How do the reindeer and Santa fly?” which led to a very in-depth discussion, followed up by painting about the many theories that were proposed.

Reflections: 

We saw through this inquiry how student-centred teaching/learning can lead to amazing opportunities for leadership development, collaboration, creative thinking, problem-solving, and innovation - important 21st century skills!