Noticing and Wondering to Launch an Inquiry

In Trey Smith's grade 5 digital literacy classes, students began learning about the issue of “space junk” or orbital debris by analyzing images from a recent news article about the topic. The images provided a little bit of mystery about the topic initially and invited speculation about what the class would be learning about. This routine served as an entryway to analyzing additional texts as students wanted to know more about the issue.

Creating a Culture of Argument

Librarian Javaha Ross designed this unit to support grade 3 students in reading intervention class. In their other classes, students were already studying space. Ms. Ross sought to build on their experiences in class by helping students consider complex questions about space, science, and government. In introducing texts and taking up questions that arose from their readings of texts, Ms. Ross was attempting to position her students as citizens who should have a say in a democracy. She encouraged oral as well as written arguments about single and collections of texts. In doing all these things, she was drawing upon resources and rationales for creating a culture of argument in a classroom provided by NWP's College, Career, and Community Writers Program (C3WP).

One question students took up was, "How should NASA spend their public funding?" Ms. Ross encouraged discussion and incorporated bar graphs to help students visualize the amount of money that Congress annually allocated to NASA. As students considered the kinds of things NASA might do with their budget, Ms. Ross then introduced the issue of space junk. She found that students were intrigued (and sometimes incensed) about the increasing amount of debris in Earth's orbit. Students eagerly brainstormed ways to safely remove the space junk.

Unpacking Texts with "Board Meetings"

In Mr. Smith's grade 5 digital literacy classes, students continued learning about the issue of orbital debris by analyzing images from another informational articles about the topic. They summarized things they surprised them on small whiteboards and shared them in a class "board meeting."

Also, after discussing who might be able to take responsibility for cleaning up the space junk, Mr. Smith explained that Congress often sets priorities for what different government agencies should do and how much money they would need to do it. Mr. Smith showed them how to search Congress.gov and look for legislation that senators and representatives have proposed or passed. Mr. Smith selected a bipartisan bill and students summarized things they learned about space junk from an excerpt from the bill.

Writing Letters to Senators

Creating texts for audiences outside of school is one of the important features of civically engaged argument writing. NWP's College, Career, and Community Writers Program (C3WP) provides rationales and resources for supporting students in "Writing to an Audience to Urge Action."

In Mr. Smith's grade 5 digital literacy classes, students wrote letters to the U.S. Senators. Some of the letters encouraged Senators to do things like learning more about existing bipartisan bills that they could join as co-sponsors. Students practiced connecting evidence to their claims and hyperlinked some of the texts we had read as a class. Students decided whether they wanted to send the letters or not.