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At Iron Station Elementary, first-grade teacher Ms. Christina Curtis didn’t set out to start a movement. She just wanted to give her students a safe space to be curious.

Enter: the Wondering Wall.

It started as a simple suggestion from an Out Teach coach during a classroom visit. Ms. Curtis’s students were constantly asking deep, thoughtful questions, and instead of brushing them aside or letting them drift away, she gave those wonderings a place to live.

All she used was a sticky note, a clipboard, and a little time.

“I told them, ‘You can ask me anything. Just make sure I’m not in the middle of teaching, and your work is done first,’” she explained. “I expected them to be stuck like, ‘I don’t know how to spell this’ but they blew me away. They used our word wall, our sound wall, and even each other. Without even being prompted.”

Suddenly, students who had been hesitant to write were lining up to spell out complicated questions. Curiosity became a gateway to literacy, and collaboration. They didn’t want to draw their questions. They wanted to write them. And they wanted to know the answers.

Soon, the questions began to pile up...on clipboards, sticky notes, and eventually a 32-page running Google doc that Ms. Curtis keeps updated with all the answers. “It’s slowed down a little since we started,” she said, “but I still have five questions sitting on my clipboard waiting for me right now.”

The best part? They don’t all wait for her. Students have started finding their own answers by asking classmates, reading books during free time, or just thinking things through together on the carpet. One student even explained why birds don’t get electrocuted on power lines after reading about it on Epic.

And the quieter students? They’re opening up too. One student who had been tough to pull out of his shell now volunteers answers when he knows them. “We’ve struggled so much,” Ms. Curtis shared. “Just seeing him feel more comfortable and more willing to share, it makes my heart so happy.”

The Wondering Wall isn’t fancy. But it works. And Ms. Curtis says that’s the point.

“If another teacher wants to try this, I’d just say: Don’t overthink it. Be clear about what it’s for, set the expectation, and then let the kids lead.”

The best questions, it turns out, are often the ones we didn’t expect.

And when asked to describe science in one word, Ms. Curtis didn’t hesitate.

“Science is everything. It’s who we are. It’s the world around us. It’s all of it.”