When we noticed many of our students playing together about babies, siblings, cousins, pets, and parents, we thought it would be a valuable opportunity to begin a family inquiry.
Every day, we played and talked together - outdoors and indoors - about our families. As we played, students discovered that they shared many commonalities with their friends’ families. They were also fascinated to learn about the things that make their families different and special.
We learned that family members have different roles and responsibilities, and families work together to help each other. Some students played about being grown-ups who “go to work” and “get money to buy food, or toys.” Some played about being grown-ups who do important jobs at home like taking care of babies, cooking healthy food, washing dishes, or doing laundry. We challenged students to think about the helpful ‘jobs’ they themselves do at home, and students were eager to share about how they help with jobs like baking, washing dishes, looking after pets, tidying their toys, and brushing their teeth.
We learned that different families live in different kinds of homes. Some families live in small homes and some live in large homes. Some families live on their own and some families live together with others in shared homes. Some families even live with many other families in tall apartment buildings! Some homes have backyards. Some homes have garages. Some students have two homes - different homes for different parents. From one of our nonfiction books, we also learned that some families do not have houses to live in, but might live in cars or other places around their neighbourhoods.
To play about homes and all the various family responsibilities the students knew about from their own families' experiences, we helped the students turn our outdoor learning space into a ‘class family’ home - a space for realistic and imaginative dramatic play. Based on the students’ ideas, our outdoor home had a bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, back yard, and car.
(Sleeping in the bedroom)
(Making recipes in the kitchen - meaningful moments to practise measuring capacity!)
(Setting the table for breakfast)
(A long line-up waiting for a turn in the bathtub!)
(Our car - a movable balance beam that bumps up and down.
Our car took us to fun places like ‘the cottage’ and ‘the movies’.)
Indoors, we turned the classroom into a home as well. Focusing on one room at a time, the students made plans and then we helped them set up a kitchen, bathroom, living room, and bedroom (with a closet for dress-up clothes), and we also built a car.
(Planning the kitchen)
(A letter we wrote together to our custodian after he brought us some play appliances and other items for the kitchen.)
(Planning the living room)
(Making the fireplace)
(Watching ‘shows’ - stories created by students on the whiiteboard ‘TV’ in the living room)
(Planning the bathroom)
(A sink with hot and cold water, and toothbrushes)
(A toilet with a push-able flusher)
(The bathtub, including some of the kids’ own bath toys from home)
(The shower)
(Planning the bedroom)
('Babies' to take care of and put to bed)
(Making decorations for the bedroom)
(Making a closet for the bedroom - which the kids wanted us to fill with dress-up clothes and silly hats!)
(Building the closet - this project provided meaningful opportunities to measure and compare lengths of sticks!)
(Making 'silly hats' for the closet - an initial introduction to patterning)
(The washing machine - not pictured here is the sand-timer which measured how long the laundry would take to finish washing)
(Planning the car and garage)
(Making the car)
(Ready for a ride!)
We also went for community walks and paid attention to the shapes we can see when we look at different families’ homes. (An enjoyable spur-of-the-moment idea: One rainy day when it was pouring too heavily to go outside for our full outdoor learning time, we “went out” for a virtual community walk and visited students’ homes on Google Maps.)
We learned that different families are different sizes. Some families are small - as small as just one parent and one child. Some families are big - including blended families with moms, dads, step-moms, step-dads, siblings, and step-siblings - and some are even bigger when you count grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins! We saw pictures in our fiction and nonfiction books about different kinds of families, and students were always excited to find families that resembled their own. We also displayed students’ and educators’ own family photos and hand-drawn illustrations on our ‘living room’ wall in the classroom. We spent a lot of time counting and comparing numbers of people in each others’ families (and practised using new math words like “more,” “less/fewer,” and “equal”).
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Side note: A favourite memory from outdoor learning one day . . .
A student noticed that leaves had begun falling from the trees in our outdoor learning space. She started collecting particular leaves that looked similar and grouping them together as ‘families’. About her brown-leaf family, she excitedly shared, “These ones have beautiful brown skin…that’s like my family!” Her idea inspired other students to collect other groups of leaves and use them to create more leaf families. So we also used these ‘leaf-family portraits’ in addition to our own family photos to practise counting and comparing number amounts.
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We learned that different families enjoy different activities together. With their families, some students in our class enjoy grocery shopping, playing at the park, picnicking, going to the beach, watching movies together (at home or at a theatre), traveling in airplanes, exercising, camping, playing at a skate-park, spending time at a cottage, riding bikes together, going for boat rides, and going for walks in the forest, among other things! Again, outdoors and indoors, we took students’ suggestions and played imaginatively about these many family activities. Students who had had particular experiences before (e.g. eating snacks at a movie theatre, building a campfire and roasting marshmallows) shared what they knew about those activities with those who had never experienced them before, so that all students could experience a broad range of activities as immersively as possible!
(Fun at the beach - on a ‘surfboard’)
(Swimming races at the cottage)
(Longer swimming races - counting the number of seconds it took each swimmer to reach the beach)
(Flying in an airplane to our camping vacation!)
(Making a campfire)
(Roasting ‘marshmallows’ - leaves skewered onto sticks)
(Swimming with the ‘fish’ (leaves), and fishing!)
(Catching fish for dinner!)
(A lovely picnic all together)
At the end of our inquiry, we created a family fiction story together as a class, and later turned it into a book to add to our class library. We practised telling the story together and shared it with our librarian. She loved it! We also used students’ drawings of their families to make another class book with common sight words in the text. These two class books are favourites to this day.
(Illustrators hard at work on the funny fiction story)
We also painted a mural to represent some of our memories from our family inquiry.
Throughout this inquiry, we made the most of many meaningful opportunities to embed math learning into our play (e.g. counting and comparing numbers, noticing and identifying shapes, measuring lengths of building materials like sticks). As always, we recorded memories of our experiences each day in our outdoor learning journals. We filled our class library with many rich fiction and nonfiction texts about families, which also provided students with wonderful opportunities to make connections and appreciate differences. Our family inquiry created space for us to celebrate diversity, and to share about and appreciate the people we love.
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