Laura Alice
- Jul 18, 2019
- 2 min read

Using Wonderopolis in the Classroom

Have you heard of the Wonderopolis website? Well, I heard about it in my Beginning Teacher years, and I love using it with my classes. It can be used for Reading Rotations, Writing inspiration, Critical Thinking, Topic, and In Depth Class Discussions. Below is a lesson where I used Wonderopolis in the classroom…

Lesson Rundown

1. We discussed what it means to Wonder...

The class had lots of great definitions for the word: To think, to ask, to learn. One student said ‘to walk’, which led us on to look at the difference between WONDER and WANDER (always a chance for a mini Vocab lesson).

2. On the board I had 4 questions with images to match. I got these questions from the Wonderopolis articles. The website has articles about questions that have been asked by kids, teachers, or just interesting things the company thinks will be helpful.

3. For each question on the board, the students wrote a paragraph. The wrote their answer to the questions. Some of them used prior knowledge that they already had, some students made up a creative answer, and some missed the point of the activity, but did some excellent writing anyway!

4. When the students had written their paragraphs, they came and showed me their writing. We would have a quick discussion about why they had written, what they had written. I love these types of conversations, it really helps to get an insight into their creative minds.

5. After they finished their paragraphs, they scanned the QR code for each question. Each QR code would take them to the article that the question had some from. (If you do not use iPads or tablets in your class, you could have the link written down for the students to type into the computer).

6. They would read the article from the Wonderopolis site, taking down facts from each article. This was like they were reading the article to find the real answer to the original question.

The students absolutely loved it! The were telling me so many facts that they had learnt. Some kids didn’t get to writing down the facts from the article, but I could see how engrossed in to the reading, I really didn’t mind. This lesson was done in an hour and a half, but could be extended out by doing one question each day.