The closest to being an artist I will probably ever get..

Spare time lately has been spent finding some great resources (Twitter is my best friend) and squirrelling them away with Evernote. It's so exciting that there's so much great stuff out there, but wow, so distracting. I need to learn to manage my Twitter addiction - finding great resources is way too much fun. Turning those resources into useful and manageable plans takes a bit more concentration.

So this last week (with many, many lapses into Twitter-play) I pulled out my Inquiry model and began to put together a skeleton plan for my first Unit of Inquiry. It's like walking a tightrope. Too much planning and it's no longer student-driven. Crazy control-freak teacher takes over and every second of learning is choreographed. Too little planning and I fall off the other side of the high wire into freakout land, where no learning happens because nothing is organised and I can't remember where or what the awesome stuff I bookmarked is.

I am sure that there are teachers out there who can plan for inquiry with their eyes closed, hands tied behind their back and dancing a jig, but I need my skeleton plan. This is not the same as the PYP planner - I am a linear, chronological thinker and while I am a big fan of backward design, when I'm in the midst of teaching I need to have all my ducks lined up nice and tidy. This beautiful beautiful document outlines all the important info (Central Idea, Inquiry Lines, guiding questions, phases of inquiry, reporting outcomes, cross-curricular links, resources) I need to stay on track, while still leaving plenty of time for student-directed learning. What it looks like at the beginning of a unit is something that would probably have earned me a 'fail' at Uni - it's a big table with all the 'have-tos' filled in and lots and lots of blank spaces. In the sparsely populated 'filled-in' bits, there are notes for activity outlines, there as a 'fall-back'. These lessons will be adapted (or completely scrapped) as needed - they are my support for when everything inevitably snowballs.

So now that I've got all my skeleton bones neatly arranged, I plan to print it out, blow it up to A3 size and subject it to lots of wanton scribble and many additions and crossings-out as the unit progresses. Last year, I trialled doing all my planning and amending online, but it didn't work for me. I am a scribbler - there's just something so satisfying about taking a nice tidy word-processed planner and scrawling revisions all over it in pen. It may be the closest to being an artist I ever get :).