Central Idea and Lines of Inquiry

The students were introduced to the Central Idea through picture clues for this unit. They were given a few pictures and were asked to come up with one word related to the picture. They were also given a few mystery books to derive the word 'mysteries'. The pictures given to them were:

They had to come up with the words; mysteries, Universe, exploration, human and unravelled. Out of these they came up with all the words except unravelled.

 Then we had all the words and now had to make a sentence using them. We also discussed the value of words like the articles and prepositions without which sentences do not make sense. We started creating unique central ideas using the words and Tejasveer came closest to the Central Idea ' Mysteries of the Universe can be unravelled by human exploration'. It was a fun and different way to derive at the Central Idea and we enjoyed the process thoroughly. 

Then I gave the students the key concepts and urged them to derive the lines of inquiry and we were quite successful in doing that as well. After this we had a discussion on how to make the unit more interesting and meaningful so that the students can gain the maximum from it. The students shared their points of view and gave various ideas. Finally, we discussed some of the questions that came to the students' minds at that point in the lesson. Some very thoughtful questions were generated in this exercise.