Now that you have taught your first inquiry science lesson, take a moment to reflect on the experience.
What were your lesson goals, both in terms of content and process skills? What strategy did you use to help students reveal and reflect on their own science ideas? What patterns did you observe in students' science ideas, writings, or drawings? Were any ideas particularly difficult or easy for students? Why was this? In what areas did students' science understandings grow? If you were going to teach a follow-up lesson to this one, what would it be and why? What question do you still have about teaching science?
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During this first week of teaching, our students were reading about kites in their basal readers, because of this Sage and I decided an exploration dealing with kites would be a nice way to integrate science into their classroom. The underlying concept that we wanted students to walk away with after our lesson was that wind is simply air in motion, and that wind can move different objects depending on its strength and the weight of the objects. This first grade content is addressed in the physical science and Earth science standards. As this class has had very few exploratory science activities we also wanted to focus on using the process skills found in the Science as an Inquiry K-4 content standards, focusing mainly on observation skills, creating experiments to test their predictions, and recording all of their results.
Surprisingly the ideas that were the most challenging for the students to grasp were not the concepts about wind or air movement, but rather the science processes and looking at science in an inquiry manner versus just being told about it. It is evident these students have done little if any “science as an inquiry” explorations. For this reason we had to spend much more time going over processes we had originally thought they already experienced, things such as making predictions, and recording results.
We opened the lesson with an activity, telling students they must find a way to move different objects across their desk without touching them, given only a straw. We had them predict which object would move the easiest. This allowed us to see and verify that the students already understood the concept that “wind” can move lighter objects easier, although many of them had trouble expressing in words the reason why until the end of the lesson. We also discussed, as a class, what moved the objects and what wind is.
We followed this with a kite making activity, where, based on the results of their first experiments, they needed to select from three swatches of material, the one they thought best to work for a kite. This allowed us an opportunity to see if the students understood that lighter material was easier for wind to move. They all selected the lightest material. After building the kites, we were able to go outside and make predictions and test our kites, and we discussed what made the kites fly best. At the end of the lesson, due to lack of time, we conducted the assessment orally, and all of the students were able to tell us many different items that a strong, medium, or light wind would be able to move.
The science processes, while being the most challenging for the students, is also the area I feel the students’ understanding grew the most. This is seen in the work that they put into their science notebooks. At the beginning of the lesson all of the students were unsure of what details to put under the drawings, and repeatedly looked for confirmation on what they were writing, but by the end of the first activity most of them were easily making observations and predictions about how far it would move as well as adding details to all of their observations.
After looking through their journals I realize that our next lesson needs to focus largely on the scientific processes such as observation and recording their results. While their notebooks showed the students improved drastically within one lesson, there is a lot of room for improvement. In the future, I would like to introduce an “observation activity”, such as giving the students a sea shell, telling them to record everything they can about that shell, and discussing with the students what type of observations are valid science observations. (For example “It’s pretty” is not a valid observation.) Then, I would have students place all of the sea shells together and see if they can find their original sea shell. Once they have more practice using some of the skills required in science, inquiry projects are much easier to incorporate because the students will know what is expected of them and how to create their own experiments based on the skill set they now have.
(The blog above is for both Sage and Julia!)
This is Chris and Kylie!!
Our lesson goals were to introduce students to the concepts of solids and liquids. Because our class had only very little science experience this year our lesson was a basic introductory activity. We wanted to include inquiry into our lesson as much as possible and allow the students to have a chance for self discovery.
As teachers we did not reveal any information to the students in order for them to make self discoveries on the objects we provided them.
Some patterns that we discovered throughout the lesson were that students were not able to fully provide a correct definition of solids. They were able to identify basic properties but were not able to determine they were solids.
Trying to identify similarities between two seemingly different solids was a challenge to the students.
Students science understandings grew by increasing their knowledge base of solids and physical science.
We are planning on teaching a follow up lesson on the properties of liquids. After this follow up lesson it will aid student understandings between the properties of solids and liquids. This is going to be a follow up because we believe our students need to learn about both solids and liquids, they coincide with each other.
A question that we still have when teaching science is what if you are teaching an iquiry lesson, and the students are not understanding it...what do you do?
After Julia and I posted the blog and had more time to reflect on our science teaching experience, we have come up with a few questions. When students are having time with the manipulatives in the exploration sense, when does a teacher need to step in and address the lesson? It was difficult to keep the students' attention once the materials were handed out, so we just let them explore. Should we have taught (spoken) during exploration time? Most students were very engaged with the examining the objects, while a few were giving us "what's next" looks. How much time is too much time when letting children explore?
This is Adele and Halden!!
Our content lesson goals were to introduce our students to the idea of floating and sinking objects, using the vocabulary terms floating, sinking, and buoyancy. The class we are placed in isn’t given the opportunity to frequently engage in inquiry based science so we thought this would be a great introductory lesson. The process skill goals we addressed in our lesson are predicting, observing and classifying information. We really wanted our students to gain experience using these process skills through our lesson due to the fact that they have had very little exposure to exploration science.
We had the students each predict which objects they thought would sink and which objects would float before we actually tested the objects to help students reveal and reflect their own ideas. We also had them separate into groups and collaborate their ideas as a whole. The patterns we observed in the students science ideas were that they thought that all heavy and big objects would sink and all light and smaller objects would float regardless of their weight.
The part that they had the hardest time wrapping their heads around is that the paper clip ended up sinking. The object that they predicted correctly and seemed really easy to understand was the marble, the majority agreed that it would sink. The students had a difficult time in their initial predictions, understanding why the paperclip sank because it’s small in size and also a very light object. On the other hand the majority of students were correct in their assumptions that the marble would sink. When we asked them how they concluded their prediction they all stated that the marble was too heavy to float.
At first students were confused by the background term buoyancy given at the beginning of the lesson. They also seemed to be confused on which objects would sink, and which would float and why. However, after exploring with the objects themselves and finding the actual results to their predictions they began to gain a new understanding of which objects would float and which would sink and why.
If we decided to teach a follow-up lesson we would teach our students, what properties and characteristics determine whether an object will float or sink. We would introduce them to the terms weight and density. We would use these ideas to further their understanding about properties of objects in water.
1. In most situations, if you use age appropriate definitions is it okay to introduce complex vocabulary to young students to further their understanding of the topic?? In our lesson we debated on whether or not to use the definition of buoyancy and how to word it into understandable terms. After teaching our lesson, we concluded that this particular word was beneficial to our lesson, but was a little difficult at first.
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