Week 12: Water
Weeks 10, 11, and 12 make up a three-week cycle about water (Hydrophere). Currently, you are in Week C: Teacher As Designer.

This week, apply what you have learned about effective activities and the Hydrosphere to create your own lesson. Use the resources listed under Readings, discuss your ideas with your teammates, then submit your lesson to your Portfolio. Read and respond to your teammates' lessons in discussion and then rate them in the Portfolio.

Assignments

Individual: (by midnight Tuesday)

  • Review the Individual Goal and Rubric for your work this week.
  • Read background information on water.
  • Reread the essential questions.
  • Design or find a sphere lesson for your students, post it in Teacher As Designer space in the Classroom space for feedback from your teammates, then revise it and repost it.

Submit your individual classroom application with goals, activities and assessment and a rationale using the criteria to your Portfolio in the Classroom for a grade.

Team: (by midnight Sunday)

  • Review the Team Goal and Rubric for your team's work this week.
  • Offer feedback to your teammates about their sphere lessons on water in Teacher As Designer space in the Classroom.

Submit your peer review (rate) of each other’s classroom applications to your Portfolio in the Classroom for a grade.

Essential Questions about Water
Design your activities to elicit your students' questions, and to help them to think about the essential questions you have been addressing:
  • How does water change?
  • How does water move?
  • How does life depend on water?
  • How does water affect the land?

Readings

GEMS Liquid Explorations and GEMS Involving Dissolving

In the National Science Education Standards what children understand about water is described:

1. Learning science is something that students do, not something that is done to them. They should become familiar with the freezing of water and melting of ice (with no change in weight), the disappearance of wetness into the air, and the appearance of water on cold surfaces. Evaporation and condensation will mean nothing different from disappearance and appearance, perhaps for several years, until students begin to understand that the evaporated water is still present in the form of invisibly small molecules.

2. Students are familiar with the change of state between water and ice, but the idea of liquids having a set of properties is more nebulous and requires more instructional effort than working with solids. Most students will have difficulty with the generalization that many substances can exist as either a liquid or a solid. K-4 students do not understand that water exists as a gas when it boils or evaporates; they are more likely to think that water disappears or goes into the sky. Despite that limitation, students can conduct simple investigations with heating and evaporation that develop inquiry skills and familiarize them with the phenomena.

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