Inquiry Celebration Reflection

The inquiry celebration is a great experience that introduces me to different strategies and situations that other pre-service teachers are researching and studying.  It gave me a chance to learn about strategies that I am encounter in my future teaching experience.
This year during inquiry, my first session was regarding math.  The past two semesters, I have been placed in Reading rooms at my PDS.  I have not had the opportunity to teach as much math as I have reading or Language Arts.  The sessions that I attended addressed different issues with math with students in special education.  They discussed different strategies to use to help students with special needs such as touch math, multiplication to teach division, hands-on activities, and teaching through the ipad.  The sessions gave me great ideas and strategies that I would like to learn more about and use in my classroom one day.
The second session I attended was on Problem-based Learning through the garden at North Elementary.  I have heard many good things about the garden at North and even discussed it in my science methods course.  However, I was not familiar with the details or how it was used throughout the school.  I was very enlightened to learn that 30 teachers at North use the garden to teach cross curricular connections.  I was amazed that the teachers at North use the garden daily to teach the different content areas, not only science.  It was so amazing to me that these teachers are using problem-based activities to focus their instruction around instead of using the usual textbook and worksheets.  I think this is such a great strategy to allows the students to learn through inquiry and hands-on activity.  It seems that the garden allows the students to actually apply their learning through the garden.  Also, I see how difficult it is to sustain the garden and find educators that are willing to be dedicated to the garden.