Observation: The Cornerstone of Scientific Inquiry
Each week Journey North migration updates feature a Photo of the Week. Build students’ scientific observation and thinking skills with the following Journal Pages.

Journal Page: Scientific Observation Skills
Describe, Wonder, Hypothesize! As students examine a photo, challenge them to think and act like scientists, describing details, writing wonder questions, and posing hypotheses. The more time and opportunities students have to carefully observe photos, the more detailed their observations will be. Build strong communication skills by providing time to share descriptions, wonderings, and hypotheses.

• Journal Page: Scientific Observation Skills

Questions to Inspire Close Observation
Use this list of Guiding Questions to Inspire Close Observation to help your students examine the Photo of the Week. Encourage them to observe details, make comparisons, interpret what they see, and consider new information.

The Teacher's Role in an Inquiry-based Classroom
Remember the teacher’s role in an inquiry-based classroom:

• Model keen observation skills by thinking aloud and recording what you see and wonder as you study a photo.
• Be a co-explorer who cultivates curiosity by generating and exploring intriguing questions.
• Inspire students to observe closely by noticing details in a photo.
• Challenge students to ask their own questions.

Journal Page

Invite students to look carefully at a photo and fill each thought-balloon on this handout with their wonderings: thoughts, feelings, questions, and hypotheses. Encourage them to share their ideas in small groups or with the whole class.

• Link to Share the Wonder Journal Page
  

Help students collect words and phrases they’ll need to communicate their scientific thinking. Use the “A Writer’s Quest for Details” chart to help students use a variety of writing strategies to “find the words” that describe the details they observe in the Photo of the Week. Invite them to use the collected words and phrases to write possible captions for the photo.

• Link to Writer's Quest Journal Page
• Example for Teacher Reference

Journal Page
Writer's Quest

Example
for Teacher Reference

You can use this collection of observation handouts for many purposes. Print and pass out copies to guide observations of Journey North photos, video clips and the natural world.

• What I Observe, What I Wonder
• Be a Keen Observer!
• I saw, I think I saw, I counted, I wonder
• What do you see? What do you think is happening? What do you wonder?
• What I already know. What I learned from observing. Questions I still have.
• Describe. What does it remind you of? What do you think it is?
• Observations, Questions
• Observations, Interpretation
• Observe. What do you know? What can you infer? What questions do you have?
• What do you think just happened? What do you think will happen next? What clues helped?
• What has changed? What do I know that could help explain the change?
• How does each adaptation help it survive or reproduce?

You can use the list of Questions to Inspire Close Observation and any of the observation handouts above to assess your students' thinking and growth. Ask yourself these types of questions as you review their responses:

• Are students’ responses increasingly detailed?
• Can students increasingly distinguish between observations and inferences?
• Do they increasingly use visual evidence (along with past knowledge) to support their explanations?