Contractions

For the past week, we have been investigating 'contractions' through a student inquiry that had students thinking about the following questions.

1. Why are English words made into contractions?
2. What are they?
3. How do they work?
4. What examples exist?
5. How are they structured?
6. When do we use them?
7. Where will we find examples?

Here is one section of our huge class poster that students made about them.

Students have been asked via a homework exercise to clarify their understanding of contractions and add anything they discover about them.

We will continue to clarify how to structure contractions, as well as continuing to investigate the different ones that exist. 

Throughout this process of discovery some very interesting structures were discovered that encouraged a wonderful discussion, that led to clarifying student understanding of the use of contractions, as well as building on their knowledge.

Here are some photos of our students working on the inquiry.

Here are the other sections of the poster.