3 - 5 grade group reflection

Last week, our group produced four invitations which we planned to offer to the students on Monday. In summary, we invited students to consider male/female roles, where does our food originate, the types of games people play around the world, and the animals people keep as pets. Although we asked some questions to get them started, we deliberately kept the invitations broad and loosely focused to give students a good deal of choice in where they went with the invitation after they selected it. We wanted to give the students as much choice as possible within the framework of a one week camp.
Today, the students seemed genuinely excited about the invitation format, which was enhanced by enclosing the invitations in large (2ft.x 18in.) colored envelopes that were affixed to the whiteboard in the front of the room. The students were thoroughly engaged in the invitation process and enthusiastically went about making secret ballot selections of their first and second choices of invitations to accept. We had decided on a secret ballot selection process to insure that students were genuinely interested in the topics and not simply selecting based on their friends' selections. Having them select first and second choices gave the students a choice while giving us some opportunity of shaping the groups to provide for diverse learning styles and knowledge base. We were also concerned that the students might gravitate toward one or two invitations and having them select two invitations optimized the chance that all invitations might be explored. In the end, our concerns were justified, the games invitation was selected by almost all participants. But because they had made two selections, we were able to form three groups to explore three invitations. We were disappointed that none of the students had selected the gender roles invitation; we thought that this invitation held great promise for an inquiry based exploration. Reflecting on the choices, we wondered whether students perceived this invitation as too academically oriented or if they were simply not attuned culturally or developmentally to this issue. Nonetheless, we believed that we could incorporate some of these issues into the invitations that the students did select.
The students seemed very motivated by the invitations and quickly got into an inquiry mode. All three groups became thoroughly engaged, reading previously selected books, researching questions on the internet, and identifying and discussing questions of interest. The challenge for tomorrow is to guide, but not force, the students along paths of inquiry that will lead to a productive learning experience and some cumulative product by Friday morning.