Week 4: The Land
Weeks 4, 5, and 6 make up a three-week cycle about land (Lithosphere). Currently, you are in Week A: Teacher As Researcher.

This week. try an activity with your students and analyze what happens. Use the resources listed under Readings, discuss your observations with your teammates, then submit your individual analysis to your Portfolio. Discuss what makes an effective activity with your team and submit a set of criteria to your Portfolio for a grade.

Assignments

Submit your individual observations, reflections and 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. Develop criteria for effective concept-building activities and the learning and teaching strategies that make them work in Teacher as Researcher in the Classroom.

Submit your team criteria with rationale and reflection on the team process to your Portfolio in the Classroom for a grade.

Essential Questions about Land
What do you know about land? What are your key questions? As you do the activities with your students, notice how they address questions like these:

• How do rocks change?
• Where does soil come from?
• How does the soil help plants grow?
• What happens to plants when they die?
• How do earthworms affect the soil?

Readings

1. Model your sample terrarium for your students. Keep this terrarium on hand as you may use it again for the Weeks 4 and 7 activities.

2. Planet Earth, while probably one of an infinite number of stellar satellites in the universe, is the only one that people really have begun to understand in depth. Earth materials or matter, while seemingly very diverse, were probably all formed from just one element (H₂) in the nuclear furnaces of stars and planets. The history of the Earth, as reconstructed in human understanding, is a story of materials made in a stellar "blast furnace," collected and mixed in a "blender," melted, solidified and plowed, pushed, forced by heat, wind, water and rocks for over four billion years. Of course this stable, yet changing, Earth has also served as the platform (or skeleton) for the development of a living planet.

3. Primary science education should help students understand Earth history as well as the dynamics of daily Earth processes. The inquiries that seem to have the greatest effect on student understanding are investigations of students' direct experiences. This three-week cycle about land is designed to focus on inquiry based learning developed from local familiar materials and events:

• What rocks, sand, clay and soil do the students have in their neighborhood?
• What are they made of?
• How did they get there?
• Where are they going?
• Why are they important to life?
• How do the air, water, living organisms, and sun affect and interact with these materials?

Web Sites

• Framework for Earth Systems Education: Understanding #7 Read Understandings 1-7. These concepts form the education framework of an effective Earth Systems curriculum.
• National Science Education Standards Of particular interest are the Content Standards: K-4 for Earth Space Science and Science Teaching Standards.
• Project 2061 Benchmarks for Elementary Science Education. This initiative of the American Association for the Advancement of Science advocates reform in K-12 science, mathematics and technology education.

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