10-30-08 - Another Day of Presentations

Our third day of presentations was just as impressive as the first two days. I must say, we have a number of people who will be great teachers in our class. There has not been one presentation yet that I have not found interesting. Today’s presentations covered Newton’s Law, taste buds, tornadoes, solid/liquids, and light/heat sources. Today’s presenters did a very nice job and were very prepared. I must say that I am really enjoying these presentations and that I am getting some neat ideas to use in the future.

10-28-08 - More Lesson Plan Presentations

Today our lesson plans continued, but due to some technical difficulties at the beginning of the class, we did not get as many in as planned. All the groups needed the projector for their presentations, and at the beginning of the class it did not want to work. After a lot of persistence, we did get it to work, but with this delay and the traditional beginning of class question session we lost about a half an hour of presentation time. This experience can now serve as an example of how we need to be flexible in our classrooms, especially when we are working with technology.

The groups that did present did a very good job. Lesson that we saw today included Mixture using Elephant Toothpaste, Oil and Water with an Environmental Emphasis, Oblick, and Bottle Rockets. All these activities were really fun. I had never seen the Elephant Toothpaste activity before, so it was great to see a new idea. Also, due to time constraints, each individual group did not get to shoot off their bottle rockets, but we were told we will get to do this. I am really looking forward to that activity. I am also looking forward to seeing the rest of the presentations, because everyone has such great ideas.

10-23-08 - Mid-term Lesson Plan Presentations

Today we started presenting our Mid-term Lesson Plans. All the lessons were so good. Everyone had such fun activities to do and the topics covered a number of areas of science. Topics covered in the lessons today included: mixtures, habitats, sinking/floating, oil and water reactions, and living and non-living things. Each lesson took just a little different approach and they were all unique in some way. There were also some very neat videos used in the lessons.

Today, my partner and I presented our lesson on sinking/floating. I thought that the lesson went very well. I feel that we were very prepared and were well organized so things ran very smoothly in the short time we had to do the activity. My only regrets are that we did not have enough time to have the class create science journal entries and that we did not discuss the results. I think that this would have been a neat thing for them to do and it would have allowed them to see the comprehensiveness of our lesson.

10-21-08 - Ready, Set, Science Chapers 5 & 6 and Leaping Eggs

A majority of class time was spent discussing Chapter 5 and 6 in our Ready, Set, Science textbook and discussing the corresponding Reading Guide. Topics discussed in these chapters included talk moves, talk format, productive classroom talk, modeling/representations, and learning progressions. Not only did we discuss what the topics were, we also applied the topics to experiences we have had in the classroom. As a result of our discussion, I felt I got a better understanding of the concepts and I was more prepared for the quiz I completed after class on these two chapters.

The other major activity we did in class was a simple activity we could do with our students that would allow us to cover many science topic. This activity was titled “The Leaping Egg (or Ping Pong Ball).” This was a very simple activity in which we tried to blow a ping pong ball from a funnel inside a plastic cup into another plastic cup. This was a fun and challenging activity and by answering the questions given regarding the activity we were able to think about a number of concepts that were present in this activity. Our class discussion revealed that this experiment touched on the ideas of force, angle and direction of air flow, and pressure. It also allowed us to think about variables that might affect the results (i.e. changes in the amount of air force applied).

10-16-08 - Internet Activities Involving Safety

Today, class was in one of the computer labs. We did a couple of activities using the computer that we could have our students use. The first activity was an online safety scavenger hunt called “Staying Safe Online.” We went to the website and followed the links provided to answer questions regarding online safety for kids. I thought it was really cool that the safety tips were provided by the characters of Disney’s Doug. I think that it is a great idea to have characters that children recognize from a TV show present safety tips. But, is Doug still popular with kids today? The second activity was a web site containing a number of different types of safety including bicycle safety, animal safety, fire safety, and many more. You could click on each individual link or navigate from page to page on each individual page. This site was easy to move thought and it provided some nice animations while still keeping the page design simple. After looking at the different links, we were assigned to comment on a few of our favorite links or safety tips.

Now one may ask, “What does this have to do with science?” And really it does not have anything to do with science. But, it is important to teach children about safety both in everyday life and in the science classroom. A logical progression of instruction may be to start talking about safety in everyday life so students can understand the importance of safety and then move to instruction on safety in the science lab. Also, a science teacher may want to use the internet in his or her classroom so an activity teaching about online safety would be very appropriate to use.

10-14-08 - Science Stories and Discrepant Events

Today in class we discussed the requirements for our Midterm Project. One requirement regards science stories, so we spent some time learning what science stories were and how they fit into our project. This was a great thing to spend some time with, because there were some unclear parts to this requirement. And actually, during the course of the class, the requirement changed. This change is meant to make the project easier, but it also caused some frustration for me. Just as I thought I totally understood the assignment, I was confused again. But by the end of class, I got back on track. After all of this discussion, we were allowed some class time to work on our projects. It is nice to have class time to work on group projects, because we all have such busy schedules. At the conclusion of class, I felt that my partner and I have a really good start to our project.

After class, I checked out a web link that Dr. E gave us. This site talked about using discrepant events to teach science. Discrepant events are useful because they engage the students’ thinking power by forcing them to re-evaluate their beliefs. Thinking back on my own experiences in science classes, the activities that involved discrepant events were the ones that I enjoyed the most. I would think that the same would hold true for my future students. After reading this article, I really look forward to using discrepant events in my classroom.

10-9-08 - Integrating the Internet Wonders of Science

Today’s out of class assignment was to explore the following web site: www.cyberbee.com. Wow, what a web site. One could spend a lot of time on this web site. I think that this web site is kind of a gateway to resources and activities on the web. There are so many resources, I think you could find an activity for anything that you would want to teach and many of the resources are conducive to the use of technology in the classroom. One link that I really liked was the Access Excellence link. From this link I found a movie investigation about sneezing as well as a link to the Bill Nye web site. The Bill Nye site was really neat, and I really liked the home demo section. Another link that I found was to a Wonders of Science Treasure Hunt. On this site, students are asked questions about science that they are suppose to find the answer to on the web. There are even hints about which sites they should look at. These are just a few of the interesting links that I found, and I am sure that there are tons more that I did not explore.

10-7-09 - Mirror Writing

Before we got to the activity for the day, we spend some much needed time discussing assignments and making sure we were all on the same page. Our class seems to struggle keeping everything straight, but it is hard to keep up when either the instructor or students miss class. Another factor that I believe influenced this problem is that fact that we are not use to using D2L as the main source for finding class assignment; we are much more comfortable having a paper schedule in front of us with every assignment and the due date explicitly explained. I’m not saying one way is better than the other; it just is harder for some of us to adjust to a new way of doing things. But, isn’t this kind of like dealing with children’s misconceptions with science. We also took a couple of minutes to discuss judging the science fair.

Moving onto today’s activity, we did an investigation on learning and memory. In this investigation, we were to write our names and symbols by looking into a mirror instead of at the pencil. This was a very difficult thing to do. I found that it was much easier to do if you didn’t look at the mirror or the pencil when you wrote, but that is kind of defeating the purpose of this lab. I think that the real purpose of this lab was to pay attention to how we learned how to adapt to writing in the mirror. But because of our long discussion, we ran out of time to really discuss this activity and what we learned from doing it.

10-2-08 - Black Box Activity

After discussing Chapter 3 in Ready, Set, Science, we did the Black Box Activity using the placemat form from the FOSS set. First we read about conceptual and physical models from the FOSS book. Then we split a sheet of paper into one centered rectangle with four individual spots for each group member to write in. Then we each individually investigated what we thought was in the four black boxes that our group received. After individually making predictions, we discussed our findings as a group and came to one combined group answer. Our group decided that there was a sphere (marble) in each box and that they varied in size. We predicted that Box D had the biggest marble followed in descending order by Box A, Box C, and Box B. As it turned out, we were really off course with our prediction. All the boxes did contain a marble, but they were all the same size. Different cardboard shapes placed in the boxes caused the differences. Box A had a triangle in the bottom left corner; Box B had a square in the bottom center; Box C had two squares in a stair-step shape in the bottom left corner; Box D had a triangle with the right side of the box as the base of the triangle. This was a really neat activity, but the best part was the placemat activity format. This is a nice way to approach group work and I had never seen this done before.