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| Student 1 | Based on my experience and the experience of Sage Robertson, which actually seemed similar, I would begin my unit in a similar way; by simply talking about reading thermometers and how to properly measure items. Then I would let the students play around for a day, but at the end of that day I would ask the students to each come up with two questions that they had about temperature, just to get their minds thinking about the subject again. The next day I would have specific questions, and a specific experiment for them to do. For instance, what happens when you mix hot and cold water together? Try it. That way the lesson was specifically aimed at the point I was trying to get across. I would ask them to chart their graphs as they went, but not chartering their graphs was a problem that sage ran into, so at the end of the lesson I would ask students to take a minute to finish their graphs if they hadn’t already. I would do this similar routine for all of the lessons until all of the crucial points were made. Now I understand that exploring is a very important part of learning, especially for younger children, but when I went through this experiment, I found myself frustrated because I didn’t know what I was supposed to be getting out of the things I was doing, I felt there was no direction, and for me, this made me less engaged, there was no mission, no drive. I know this is the opposite for what sage found, but I would hate for this to happen to my children. I feel a solution to this problem would be to have a pointed question each day and then allow for some creative time at the end where students could try different things that they were curious about. That way they could express their ideas and thoughts as well as learning the ideas and concepts that are important. I would definitely end the unit with a science talk. I think this is a great idea because it wraps up all the loose ends and also reinforces ideas that may have still been a bit shaky to some children. |
| Student 2 | I think I would begin a unit on thermal phenomena with a KWL chart. From Sage’s experience, it appears that there were many questions that children wanted to try and answer. By making a chart, it might be possible to home in on a few key questions that might avoid having too much chaos. I think in the 4/5th class it is also important to emphasize how the class will be managed ie: there need to be some kind of ground rules for what I would expect to see happening such as allocating roles for each student such as data collector, supply manager, clean-up person etc. students will then have a clearer sense of how to explore. I think that the inquiry portion with students learning about the temperature probes in Sage’s class sounded very good. I would have the students write in their science journals afterwards to get some idea of what they learned from it. Once the students have decided on some ideas that they would like to explore we could have a small group or “think, pair, share” time for thinking about how they will conduct their investigation and have students list some of the variables that might be important to consider. It might be good to clarify what is meant by “evidence” so that students can evaluate each others’ results and look for possible ways to improve their experiments. |