Fall 2009: Homework Week 3

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Fall 2009-Day 6
Instructional Strategy of Homework

Exploring Mirrors with Friends and Family
With at least one friend or family member, explore and explain a property of mirrors. It can be something that we have already explored in class or something new. You choose how and what to explore. Please summarize your experiments and comment on what you learned about teaching and learning. Submit here and post on the Discussion Forum of BlackBoard.

On Thursday, you will be facilitating a conversation about the moon with third graders at the elementary school. The plan is to have 9-10 children in each room, with 3 of you facilitating a conversation witth 3-4 children, and one of us (Teacher, Michele, Emily, perhaps Adam if he can come) to help out as needed.

The teacher has asked that we begin by having the children share their observations with you and the classmates in their small group. As part of this conversation, they should talk about patterns they can see in their observations. As they do so, you should write on chart paper the patterns they generate. Also write on a separate chart any questions they have. Then you should help them to develop a model to explain those patterns. She noted that they would need some words of wisdom about how to behave with the sytrofoam balls and toothpicks before you hand them out and do the 'moon dance.' (There's a piece of this that we didn't get to and will do on Tuesday after the midterm, where you have the students act out the parts of the sun, earth, and moon.) Near the end of the time the three small groups should present their findings to one another.

Please write out a plan for doing this. You do not need to have a formal lesson plan structure. Please just provide a brief description of each step of this process. The most imporant aspect is to write out explicitly the questions that you would ask to facilitate each step of this process.

Example Student Response