Chapters 1-4

Chapters 1-4:

Chapter 1: Inquiry: The Path; Discovery: The Destination

"Science seeks explanations to our everyday questions and offers us strategies for knowing what to do when we don't have an answer". Teaching science to students is a new and exciting topic. Students are leaving about things they did not know and come up with amazing questions. Elementary-aged students are so curious when it comes to science and want to explore. Scientific inquiry requires careful, active observations of details and connections in of systems and events we encounter. The student's brains are developing so much and so frequently. Science is a way of knowing and seeks explanations for the natural world. Science is a human activity and the students need to be moving around and becoming one with science. They will learn so much more when they are given a task to solve and can do what they want to do (to a certain extent). Students will be able to discover so much more. 

Chapter 2: Constructing Knowledge and Discovering Meaning: How Children Learn Science

"Children Learn science by doing science". They also learn by reflecting on their actions when they do science. Students come to class with some prior knowledge about science. This prior knowledge can lead them to a path of misconception. Chapter 2 focuses a lot on constructivism. This is a theory about how children learn. As a teacher, you need to teach your students about the natural world or their conceptions about science and teach them an accurate and complete understanding. Differentiated instruction in something that needs to be present in every classroom. All students learn differently and you need to accommodate all students and their learning. UDL is an approach to teaching that facilitates differentiated instruction. UDL has three strategies: "multiple means of representation, expression, and engagement. 

Chapter 3: Science Practices and Inquiry Process Skills

"Inquiry is the careful and systematic method of asking questions and seeking them". Students will be teaching themselves and when they notice they are teaching themselves, discovery occurs. Students will make discoveries on their own and it will deepen their understanding of science. Not every student you have will enjoy learning this way. If you start students young by constantly doing hands-on activities for science, they will begin to enjoy the process of learning science because they are the scientist. They are dsicoverying and finding. The students need to be taught how to do science and develop a set of skills. 

Chapter 4: Planning and Managing

Unit and lesson planning are two different yet similar things. When you are planning a unit you are planning what the students need to know as a whole and can take long to complete. Lesson plans are single components of the unit plan. Unit plans are long-term and lesson plans are short-term. Teachers need to use state standards with each lesson and unit. Good lesson plans result in amazing learning experiences for your students. Lessons plans include both direct instruction and inquiry instruction. It is important to use outside resources when creating your lessons. You can get many good ideas from other people or online resources. 

Group 3 Inquiry

Group 3: Secondary effects of Climate Change: Inquiry Lesson

The teachers did a great job on their inquiry lesson. It included the 5E's that are required for inquiry-based. To explore the teachers used powtoon. The students had to create a timeline for short and long-term goals of climate change based on the secondary effects. The teachers created groups and each student received a pamphlet and a job for the group. The students were part of the climate change committee. To explain, the teachers explained the scientific method and the students had to fill it out themselves and then the teachers showed the answers with a drop down. Every student knew what their job was and it was clear what was going to be done. Students were prompted if they needed help. A sheet was provided for the students to write down their answers for the traveling detectives. The teacher did a great job at explaining and doing a step by step explanation for everything the students needed to complete. The teachers could further explain the scientific method for the students. I liked how the teachers kept the students organized, I really like that and was good for the students because they knew what needed to be done. I liked how you made the students do it step by step so no one gets far ahead and asked if they were ready to move on. Both teachers did a great job circulating throughout the room. The teachers encouraged the students with their educated guesses and also showed them some important aspects of the investigation. The students had to create a slide and provide their information and finding reflections of the students was the use of a ppt slide. We were able to see the metacognition of the lesson. I really like the use of google slides for the students to share their observations and having the students public speak, this was really great.

Group 3

Group 3: Direct Instruction: Secondary effects of Climate Change

The teachers did a good job presenting the lesson but like everyone else in the class, there are
parts that need to be worked on. The teachers asked for what cause and effect is and the
students had to reply. Then described with examples. Asked what they already know about climate change. The teachers should have done expectations of the students beforehand. Next time visuals of each, in the beginning, would be nice, I like that you are using the board as something different but wasn't a fan of the use of the whiteboard. The students had to come up with 4-6 facts they knew about global warming. Wasn't sure if this was the development of not, was unclear. My suggestion is the group should have taught about global warming: explain, demonstrate, modeling and checking for understanding. The use of a whiteboard wasted some time and hard for students to read could have typed in while asking the questions. The students should of filled out the google forums, but I do understand that it was done this way to save time but could have done a different activity for this. you did this to not waste time. Kahoot was used as a guided practice. The use of the name generator was faster for kahoot, a tip from last class from the other group. For the closure, the teachers asked students to list the causes and effects of global warming then asked secondary effects. The teachers could write down questions they had about the topic still and answer one question- 2 questions, simple and to the point. True and false was a good way to check their understanding, simple but not able to truly check the understanding of the students and questions need to be deeper. I like the use of an article, it is different but would have been helpful to have it on the board and read it off of there. I was unsure what many parts of the lesson were.

Group 2

Group 2: Climate and weather 

Every Monday night a new group presents their lesson plan. It is nice to see what other future teachers think of and can create. Everyone needs to create a direct and inquiry lesson. The use of the 5 E's is super important and they incorporated all of them. For this groups engage they had the students become travel detectives. They also used flipgrid to share their findings and they use of Powtoon to explain what the students would be doing. Pre-assessed by going over the scientific method. I like the use of this activity and how they used Powtoon because the students really do enjoy this resource. I like that the teachers used the pull-down option on the powerpoint and made the students think about what each step is. For exploring the teachers explained the lesson and introduced the problem with the Powtoon. The inquiry possessed was not modeled. Creating a model what both of you solved prior would have helped the students. I know Jamie was typing up a key request for the students while working with them. For explain, the students were prompted if they needed help. A sheet was provided for the students to write down their answers for the traveling detectives. I like that the teachers provided a list of websites for the students to use. That was something really great and I did not even think of for my lesson. To evaluate,
Both teachers did a great job circulating throughout the room. The teachers encouraged the students with their educated guesses and also showed them some. Important aspects of the investigation. The reflections of the students were the use of flipgrid. For elaborate, We ran out of time for the lesson, would have been nice to see. During the direct instruction, they had vocabulary boxes, with either pictures or words. One teacher was moving around the room to make sure the student's computers were on what they needed to be and the right places in the notes and the other was presenting. Both teachers would alternate on this. Turn and talk to your neighbor. They emphasized certain points the students need to know. They real-life l life examples. This was for the development part of the lesson.

Lets review slide was good so the students would understand the concepts. The slides were short and had all the information.

This group did a great job and they are going to be great teachers!

Article review

For my article review, I chose "What can trees tell us about the air we breathe in our home" by Jordan Wilson, V. Samaranayake, Matt Limmer and Joel Burken. I thought this article was a good one to review because it involves the ideas that the air in houses can be affected by bad stuff, called contaminants. Sometimes harmful chemicals enter the air in buildings from nearby contaminated soil and groundwater through cracks or gaps in the foundation. This is a process known as vapor intrusion. This poses some risk to our health because we spend so much of our time indoors. Currently, it’s difficult and expensive to figure out if vapor intrusion is happening. That’s why we wanted to see if trees can serve as indicators for vapor intrusion. When we talk about air pollution, we usually imagine big factories that produce a lot of chemicals or traffic jams in big cities. These are serious issues that can cause many health problems, but they usually affect the air outside. Most of us spend much more of our lives indoors, at home, school, or work. These are places where we breathe “indoor air,” or air inside buildings. Sometimes the indoor air can be contaminated: some building materials emit harmful vapors. This is good to teach the students that air pollution is not only outside but inside commonplace we are every day. 

In the article, an experiment was completed:
The samples consisted of 109 tree-core samples 10 replicate samples (samples of the same trees to see how well the values can be repeated) 2 control samples (samples that show if there is contamination getting into the tree-core samples from other sources). Between November 2014 and September 2016, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency tested this region. They collected and analyzed groundwater, soil, and soil-gas samples as well as indoor air and air below the foundations of buildings. Other good news is that the tree samples we collected are good indicators of chemicals in indoor air as well. We can all do a lot of things to improve the quality of our indoor air: open windows regularly, completely close the caps on all chemicals at home, and not buy more chemicals, than we need. 

It is important to teach students about experiments being conducted and problems that are occurring in the environment. They need to be aware of this issues. This article can be used in the higher grades, 5-6. You can use this article to check the students understanding by using the question provided with the article. This can be a science lesson or an ELA lesson. If used for an ELA lesson, you want to remind the students to use complete sentences and to highlight important information in the article that can answer the questions. This can also be read to the students and talk about the article with them to answer any questions they may have about it .The article also provides a glossary of the words that students may not understand. As the teacher, you can add more words that you know your students may not understand. 

Overall, this article was very informative a taught me about environmental issues that I was not ever aware of. Everyone is always learning!

Presenting our lesson

Today, we presented our first two lessons. It was hard because it is an after-school program and there were not a lot of students and students how to be recruited. Students were also coming in and out. Being the first group there were some things that could have gone better but also getting 6 days to complete 2 lessons one 30 minutes and the other an hour was unfair. For the direct lesson, we started it 15 minutes later than we were supposed to so that put a time crunch on the lesson. I felt we were rushed and so did my teammates. I thought the lesson was thought out and presented to the best of our ability. Hearing classmates feedback and device was helpful. We also learned a lot of things we could have added to the lesson and things that could have been taken out. The inquiry lesson went really well and the students were engaged in the activity.  

For the direct lesson, we taught the students about combustion. We provided them with a powerpoint that was linked with pear deck and had words that were highlighted to write in their guided notes. Then we had the students complete a smart board activity. Since we were rushed for time, we had to cut our lesson short in order to complete everything we needed for our inquiry lesson.

For the inquiry lesson, we introduce the students to Firefighter Fred on Powtoon who needed the students’ help. Powtoon was a really amazing and fun resource to use and would love to use in my future classroom. Inquiry involves the students taking what they learned and solving a problem on their own or with other classmates. Firefighter Fred will welcome the students by saying, “Hello scientists! My name is Firefighter Fred!”. The next slide will show Firefighter Fred asking the students for help. He will say “We know just how smart you all are and we need your help today!” The following slide will go on to say “Earlier today a house caught on fire. Luckily everyone is ok and no one got hurt. The house only has minor damage because us firefighters responded quickly!”. The students had to listen to another slide of Firefighter Fred saying, “This is where we need your help scientists! We cannot seem to figure out how the fire started. There were a few things that we found in the house that could have possibly started a fire but we are having trouble narrowing it down. We need some real science investigators!” I will project a slide of the steps of the scientific method as a reminder of how to conduct an experiment/investigation and collect data for their hypothesis. The question will be provided on the sheet for them, which will ask “How did the fire start?”. As the students were collecting their information and moving throughout the room, Firefighter Fred randomly makes announcements that there is breaking news. The breaking news will help the students narrow down their inferences and assist them in forming their conclusion.

The teaching program is all about learning on how to be the best teacher we can be.