Try this activity out with one of your classes.

• Find four or five objects that are relevant to the topic you are teaching and that could be put around the classroom, such as pictures, maps or artefacts (e.g. if you were teaching a topic on light, you might bring in a torch).
• Ask the students to work in pairs. If there is enough room in the classroom, you might ask them to leave their seats and come and look at the objects. If there is not much space, you could do this in sequence, with only six or seven pairs looking at a time.
• When the students return to their seats, ask them to write a question for each object. Proceed by writing some of the students’ questions on the board and working with them to refine the questions and classify them.
• In a whole-class discussion, get the students to answer the questions that can be answered straight away. Then discuss with them how they could answer the other questions. List their ideas, and then tell them they will try to answer some of these questions in the next lesson. Ask them to bring in any books they may have that might help them answer some of the questions.