While we don't teach lessons in the traditional sense, a very basic informal activity we do with children during educational programs is to have them determine what an animal eats, the area where it might nest or den, how it catches it food based on the appearance of the animal (size, coat, teeth, eyes, ears and so on). The level of inquiry is structured as we provide the questions, and give them procedures (look at teeth, look at eyes) and they then give explanations/answers based on what they discover while looking at the animal. The science practices of posing questions and sharing verbal results as a group helps develop confidence and practice in learning about experiments.
To modify to move toward a guided inquiry, we will still provide the questions above but encourage them create methods to test their questions, to seek out other options such as perform literature searches in reference materials and analyzing data, this would provide them other resources to answer questions and draw their conclusions.
My concept of inquiry is seeking knowledge, solutions & answers by being a present and engaged learner. It is about satisfying the why, through observations, research and investigations. Inquiry can also be interpretive in nature, there are different methods to reach the same conclusions.
