The second trip at Haw River Elementary School was definitely much more successful than the first trip to the elementary school. My partners and I had a group of 6 students to do the parachute tests. For our parachute drop we chose to use and test different canopy materials. These materials were a plastic bag, aluminum foil and a coffee filter.
This time I felt a lot more prepared for the activities and the students also understood the concepts much better. It was nice to be able to relate building a parachute to how parachutes come in handy for sky divers. At first the students did not know what a parachute was, but after we gave them the sky diver example they knew exactly what it was. One of the hardest things to do with this activity was to make sure that the students were dropping the parachutes from the same heights. This was hard to do when there are some tall and some short students, therefore our measurements were not exact. Other than that the activity went pretty well. By the end of the allotted time the students had some idea of how the materials used for the canopy determined how slow or fast the parachute dropped.
finding nemo bathroom
1 year ago
I definitely felt more prepared for this lesson as well and felt much more comfortable going into it than the bubble activity. I just felt more confident with my understanding of the topic and therefore felt like I was going to teach it better.
ReplyDeleteThe kids seemed to grasp the concept much better, especially considering the lack of information covered in the 2nd grade lesson. My group allowed us to cover the actual lesson material before jumping in to the activity. They were able to draw resonable conclusions and make accurate predictions which was awesome. They followed directions much better than expected.
I think by modeling it for them we were able to keep a hold on them and their attention much better than before. Also, we explained the assignment and brainstormed before the supplies were handed out which I think made a big difference.
I also felt more prepared for this lesson. My students seemed to understand the content too, which was awesome! We also thought about the issue of dropping the parachute at the same height. One thing that we did that seemed to help with that was having the same student drop it each time. We explained to them that we had to do that so we could get the most accurate results. Then once we finished timing three parachute drops, we let the other students drop it for fun :) It seemed to work, so maybe you could try that next time!
ReplyDeleteThanks for your thoughts! I am glad it seemed to go well!
Dear Liz, I'm glad you had a good science experience in science at Haw River. I wonder if the reason you felt more prepared and like the children understood better is because YOU actually felt more comfortable with the subject matter. I think that could have a huge part to play...Which has interesting implications for our grown up teaching. I hate to think about being a terrible teacher of a particular subject becuase I simply do not feel overly comfortable with the content. eek!
ReplyDeleteLove, Megan