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Week
6: Land
Weeks 4, 5, and 6 make up a three-week cycle about land (Lithosphere).
Currently, you are in Week C: Teacher As Designer.
This week, apply what you have
learned about effective activities and the Lithosphere 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 land.
- Read the essential
questions.
- Design a lesson or
find a sphere lesson for your students, post it in Teacher As
Designer space in the Classroom
for feedback from your teammates, then revise it and repost
it.
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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 land in Teacher As
Designer space in the Classroom.
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Submit your
peer review (rate) of each other’s classroom applications to
your Portfolio in the Classroom
for a grade.
Essential
Questions about the Land
Design your activities to elicit your students' questions, and to help
them to think about the essential questions you have been addressing:
- 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?
Readings
1.Earth at Hand, pp. 24-29.
2.In the National
Science Education Standards what
children understand about the land is described for Earth
and Space Science, CONTENT STANDARD D: As a result of their activities
in grades K-4, all students should develop an understanding of properties
of Earth materials, objects in the sky and changes in Earth and sky:
- "Young children are naturally interested in
everything they see around them--soil, rocks, streams, rain, snow,
clouds, rainbows, sun, moon, and stars.
- During the first years of school, they should be
encouraged to observe closely the objects and materials in their
environment, note their properties, distinguish one from another and
develop their own explanations of how things become the way they are.
- As children become more familiar with their
world, they can be guided to observe changes, including cyclic changes,
such as night and day and the seasons; predictable trends, such as
growth and decay, and less consistent changes, such as weather or the
appearance of meteors.
- Children should have opportunities to observe
rapid changes, such as the movement of water in a stream, as well as
gradual changes, such as the erosion of soil and the change of the
seasons.
- Children come to school aware that Earth's
surface is composed of rocks, soils, water, and living organisms, but a
closer look will help them identify many additional properties of Earth
materials. By carefully observing and describing the properties of many
rocks, children will begin to see that some rocks are made of a single
substance, but most are made of several substances.
- In later grades, the substances can be
identified as minerals. Understanding rocks and minerals should not be
extended to the study of the source of the rocks, such as sedimentary,
igneous, and metamorphic, because the origin of rocks and minerals has
little meaning to young children.
- Playgrounds and nearby vacant lots and parks are
convenient study sites to observe a variety of Earth materials. As
students collect rocks and observe vegetation, they will become aware
that soil varies from place to place in its color, texture, and reaction
to water.
- By planting seeds in a variety of soil samples,
they can compare the effect of different soils on plant growth. If they
revisit study sites regularly, children will develop an understanding
that Earth's surface is constantly changing. They also can simulate some
changes, such as erosion, in a small tray of soil or a stream table and
compare their observations with photographs of similar, but larger
scale, changes.
- By observing the day and night sky regularly,
children in grades K-4 will learn to identify sequences of changes and
to look for patterns in these changes. As they observe changes, such as
the movement of an object's shadow during the course of a day, and the
positions of the sun and the moon, they will find the patterns in these
movements. They can draw the moon's shape for each evening on a calendar
and then determine the pattern in the shapes over several weeks.
- These understandings should be confined to
observations, descriptions, and finding patterns. Attempting to extend
this understanding into explanations using models will be limited by the
inability of young children to understand that Earth is approximately
spherical. They also have little understanding of gravity and usually
have misconceptions about the properties of light that allow us to see
objects such as the moon. (Although children will say that they live on
a ball, probing questions will reveal that their thinking may be very
different.)
- Students can discover patterns
of weather changes during the year by keeping a journal. Younger students
can draw a daily weather picture based on what they see out a window
or at recess; older students can make simple charts and graphs from
data they collect at a simple school weather station. Emphasis in grades
K-4 should be on developing observation and description skills and the
explanations based on observations. Younger children should be encouraged
to talk about and draw what they see and think. Older students can keep
journals, use instruments, and record their observations and measurements."
Web
Sites
- The
Evergreen Curriculum This Canadian site includes a curriculum guide
for the elementary grades.
-
Soil for the Senses The Life Lab Science Program presents a sample
lesson in which students investigate and describe the properties of
soil.
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