Geography and Inquiry Based Leaning!

During Term 2, our class participated in a Geography unit titled "Our Town Proserpine!"  This unit was written by Mrs Hornstra as part of the TCEO Inquiry Based Learning Program, 2014 (otherwise known as IBL).  You can find out more about IBL in this blog post.

Our unit began with a Big Question that arose when we got an email from Mrs Hornstra's sister who wanted to visit Proserpine with her family, but was unsure of what she could do on a holiday here.  The Big Question was:

"Why should people visit Proserpine?"

To answer our question, we then made a list of sub questions and used a mind map to organise these questions and how we were going to answer them.

Mind Map made at bubbl.us.   

We then made a colourful grafitti wall with all the places that we knew to visit in Proserpine:

All the great places we know of in Proserpine!

Then we interviewed other people to find out their favourite places in Proserpine.  We also asked why these places were so special to them.  With the answers from our interview questions, we chose 6 of the most popular places to visit and we made a web site with the details of each place.

https://sites.google.com/a/prspne.catholic.edu.au/whyvisitproserpine/

One of our questions was how will people find all of these fantastic places to visit?  So we learnt some new mapping skills and then put our new skills into practise to make a very colourful map for visitors to use.

Learning new mapping skills with compasses.

Our map with our favourite places
 to visit in Proserpine!

We were finally happy that we had the answer to our Big Question so we decided we had to email Mrs Hornstra's sister to let her know why she and her family should visit Proserpine.  We decided to also use our new persuasive writing skills to convince her that it was the best place to visit!  Each student wrote an email to the family.  I would love to put all these on the blog because each one was so fantastically convincing, but there is just not enough space!  All I can say is that if you have friends or relatives thinking of coming to stay with you, get in touch with us here in 2H.  We can point you in the right direction with our web site, map and very convincing emails that we would be happy for you to browse through!