Wacky Weather on another Manic Monday

Since Spring has just begun, I became excited about the warm weather that would be arriving soon.  Little did I know, we became bombarded with snow this morning!  It was something I definitely was not expecting!  I woke up, looked out my window and saw a layer of snow blanketing the grass; it was quite a disappointment because I then had to walk to my Spanish class in the freezing cold snow!  As the day progressed, my Science Methods course had fieldwork at the elementary school on campus.  I didn't even want to know how much snow had accumulated since I had last been outside!  The temperature increased as the day moved on and the snow abruptly turned into rain, washing and melting all of the unwanted snow away.  Hopefully that was the last of the snow for this year, but who knows!  This has been one crazy winter.

Reflecting on the Past to Improve the Future

While answering discussion questions online for my paperless Science Methods for Childhood Education course, I started to think about a Science lesson I distinctly remember from my fifth grade class when I was in elementary school. 

My Science Methods class was posed with this question:  As part of her class’s exploration of atoms, Ms. Murray has the students work with “mystery boxes” containing everyday objects. Did you ever have a science lesson in which you had to try to identify or describe something you couldn’t see? In what ways does this kind of lesson build students’ scientific skills?
I never had the opportunity to partake in a Science lesson that used a mystery box but I do vividly remember working with a mystery mixture.  My fifth grade Science teacher was teaching us how to make observations, predictions and hypothesis.  She created mixtures in Dixie cups for each student that contained water and babypowder.  She made it a point not to tell us was the mixture consisted of because she wanted us to create our own predictions from our oberservations.  We used the three out of the five senses (sight, smell and touch) to determine what this mixture was made of.  We learned that the safest way to smell something that we were unsure of its make-up was to "woft" the smell.  The class also learned the importance to never taste or digest a material we were unsure of incase it was poisonous. 

We started fieldwork today, and the fifth grade class we are working with is learning about mixtures.  I could definitely use this experiment in my lesson plan I am going to create to teach the students about experimenting and dealing with unknown mixtures.

This is definitely an idea for a lesson that I could use in my future classroom to teach about observations.  Thinking back on a lesson that has left an impression on my life professionally is something that I will carry with me throughout my journey at becoming an elementary educator.

This lesson also ties in with our previous week's main topic, which was messyness.  The title to this person's blog seems as though the experiment did not go as planned, but the children had fun and learned new things anyways.  Here is a link to someone's Tumblr page I found who did a similar experiment with a young boy.  They posted pictures of the babypowder and water creation and their observations, pretty cool stuff!! 

Jig-Saw Activity--A Great Way To Get Students to Learn Interactively!

Last week, my Methods of Science Education class focused on creating a mock Jig-Saw activity.  We split up into groups of five where we each determined one of the five kingdoms to research on our own.  Then, we created new groups, our "expert groups."  In these groups, we all had the same kingdom and we shared, via GoogleDocs, the information we gathered to make sure we all had similar information.  After the "expert groups" reviewed their shared information and created a worksheet for the rest of their original groups, we all taught our groups about our kingdoms we studied.  We took notes on our laptops during everyone's lessons into our Jot Charts via Microsoft Word.  After our class was over, our teacher assigned us to take an online quiz where we were asked to save our desktop image and upload it to our blogs!

I really enjoyed this activity and will use it in my future classroom.  I thought it was a great idea because students learn the most when they teach others.  It was also a great way to teach students the importance of good note-taking skills because there was an online quiz to be followed afterward.  The online quiz is a great way to assess the students' learning from this lesson.  I loved this assignment and thought it was great to get students motivated about a certain topic because they are to be considered "experts" in that field.  

Here are the results from my online quiz about the 5 Kingdoms.  As you can see, it was a great learning experience because I received a perfect score for my quiz!

Here is the link to the quiz, maybe you could take the quiz and realize the importance of the Jig-Saw activity and learning from peers! :) The Kingdoms of Life.