PYP unit of inquiry planner example: Taking Care of Myself, a PYP 1 Who We Are unit

Designing engaging learning experiences: the six-week inquiry journey

The unit moves through the phases of inquiry across six weeks. Full day-by-day detail: every engagement with its stations, teacher questions, outcomes, ATL, learner profile, assessment tool and resources: is in the Unit Planning Grid (Artifact 03).

Designing engaging learning experiences: Play

What opportunities are there for uninterrupted play, indoors and outdoors?

Station-based play runs through every week: the hygiene-tools role-play corner (teach a doll the routine), the Class Café and snack-shop dramatic play, the food-group museum, outdoor movement circuits, and the brushing station. Stations remain open across the week so play can be revisited and deepened.

What opportunities are there for student-initiated experiences?

Learners choose which Wonder Table object to investigate, which habit to track for 7 days, their Wellness Promise goal, their campaign team’s message and role, and the two portfolio pieces that show their growth.

How can we create authentic opportunities for students to develop and demonstrate ATL skills and learner profile attributes?

Real routines are the practice ground: washing hands before the Friday cooking, sharing fruit fairly (Principled, Caring), keeping the tracker independently (Self-Management, Balanced), and comparing before/after drawings and graphs (Thinking, Reflective).

Designing engaging learning experiences: Symbolic exploration and expression

What opportunities are there to support the development of language and mathematical understandings?

Language grows through the unit’s real purposes: read-alouds and retelling, the “How to Wash Your Hands” instruction mini-book for younger children, plate captions with CUPS, the fruit-chaat recount, and campaign poster text. Mathematics grows the same way: counting and estimating collections, tally charts and pictographs from real surveys, halves and quarters through fair sharing, o’clock and half-past on routine timelines, and growing patterns as habit ladders.

How will students express their ideas, make connections and consolidate their understanding in different contexts?

Through drawing, sorting, building, role-play, graphing, writing, movement, art (healthy-plate collage, habit puppets), song, and presenting to a real audience: every learner has multiple modes to show the same understanding.

How are we integrating languages to support multilingualism?

Home-language food and body words join the word wall; families contribute names of home dishes for the food museum; Hindi and Telugu lessons carry the healthy-habits thread (the story Aalasi Ladka, the poem Endukuraa…); learners may explain their thinking in any language, with peers and teachers bridging.

Designing engaging learning experiences: Learning spaces

How will flexible learning spaces promote exploration, wonder, creativity, risk-taking and learning through play?

The room is arranged as an inquiry landscape: the Wellness Wonder Table, the Wonder Wall and inquiry map, the Class Café wall of balanced plates, the reading basket of body-and-health books, the role-play corner, and real spaces beyond the room: washbasins, dining hall, playground: used as learning spaces in their own right.

How are resources and materials organised to support student choice and agency?

Sorting cards, play foods, art materials, measuring tools and books are stored at learner height in labelled, open trays; learners choose materials for how they represent their learning.

What opportunities are there to involve students in the co-design and co-construction of learning spaces?

Learners build the displays that drive the unit: the Wonder Wall grows from their questions, the Class Café wall from their plates, the campaign gallery from their posters; the class decides together how the room should change for the buddy-class visit.

Supporting student agency

• Learners co-construct the essential agreement, the inquiry map and the success criteria.

• Learner questions from the Wonder Wall steer Weeks 2–4 mini-inquiries; Week 5 returns the questions to their owners to answer.

• Choice is structural, which habit to track, which goal to promise, which campaign message to champion, which work enters the portfolio.

• The Learner Portrait, Grows & Glows and CUPS peer checks put self-assessment in learners’ hands from Week 1.

• Action is invited, never assigned: trackers, promises and campaigns are owned by the learner and celebrated when initiated.

Teacher and student questions: emerging during the inquiry

Emerging teacher questions

Anticipated emerging student questions

• Can something be an everyday food for one person and a sometimes food for another?

• What happens to your body when a habit is missed for a week?

• Who helps you keep your promise when it gets hard?

• How could our campaign change what happens at home?

• Why did the egg in cola change the most?

• Do grown-ups have sometimes foods too?

• Why do I feel tired after lots of sweets?

• Can we teach the little ones (EYP) what we learned?

Ongoing assessment

What evidence will we gather about students’ emerging knowledge, conceptual understandings and skills?

Anecdotal records at stations, checklists (handwashing sequence, food sorts), work samples (balanced plates, mini-books, graphs, trackers, promise cards), photos and recordings of role-play and expert talks, and learner conversations: all building each learner’s portfolio toward the Week 6 formative tasks (Artifact 07).

How are we monitoring and documenting learning against learning goals and developmental milestones?

Evidence is filed against the unit’s learning goals; the Week 1 “My Day” baseline is deliberately re-drawn in Week 5 so growth is visible to the learner as well as the teacher. Week 6 tasks are scored on the four-level rubric (Exemplar · Intermediate · Developer · Beginner) alongside the Learner Portrait.

How are we using ongoing assessment to inform planning, and the grouping and regrouping of students?

Weekly evidence reviews regroup learners flexibly: by readiness for scaffolded stations, by interest for campaign teams, and decide which misconceptions need re-teaching before the assessment week.

Making flexible use of resources

People: school nurse/doctor via Expert Talk, PE teacher, families through trackers and the Home Connect Letter. Places: washbasins, dining hall, playground, library. Texts: I Will Never Not Ever Eat a Tomato · Germs Are Not for Sharing · Gregory, the Terrible Eater · Oh, the Things You Can Do That Are Good for You! Materials: real hygiene objects, play foods, balance scale, sand timers, mini clocks, experiment materials (glitter, pepper, eggs, liquids), chart paper and art supplies. Resources serve as provocations first: objects to question, not handouts to complete.

Student self-assessment and peer feedback

What opportunities are there for students to receive teacher and peer feedback?

CUPS peer checks on writing, partner feedback on instruction mini-books (“can your partner follow step 2?”), warm-and-cool feedback on campaign rehearsals, teacher conferencing at stations, and the 1:1 Week 6 conference.

How do students engage with this feedback to develop as self-regulated learners?

Learners act on feedback the next day by design (the mini-book improves across three sessions; posters are revised after rehearsal), track their own habit data, and use the Learner Portrait and Grows & Glows to name their strengths and next steps in their own words.

Ongoing reflections: for all teachers

How are we responding to students’ emerging questions, theories, inquiries and interests throughout the inquiry?

The Wonder Wall is reviewed at the weekly team meeting; at least one learner question is built into the following week’s plan, and the inquiry map is updated visibly so learners see their questions steering the unit.

How are we supporting opportunities for student-initiated action throughout the inquiry?

Trackers, promises and the campaign create low-threshold openings for action; unprompted action observed at school or reported by families is celebrated in circle time and recorded in the Action log.

How can we ensure that learning is purposeful and authentic and/or connects to real-life challenges and opportunities?

Every investigation stays anchored in the learners’ actual lives: their own lunchboxes, the school washbasins, their families’ food traditions, and the unit closes with real audiences and real stakes: a buddy class to teach, a promise kept at home, routines that continue after the unit ends.

How are we nurturing positive relationships between home, family and school as a basis for learning, health and well-being?

The Home Connect Letter opens the unit; the tracker and Wellness Promise travel home mid-unit; families are invited as Expert Talk speakers; the Three-Way Conference (28 Aug) and Student-Led Conference close the loop.