SCED Week Six

This week, we began a hands on activity for our Water Cycle project, and that definitely is what I am most proud of and also most excited about!  I believe my group has really found a way to show students the variety of "life cycles" each water droplet can take as it makes its way through the water cycle!  While this is the part of my week that I am most proud of, it was also the largest struggle, because there was only one standard we could find that actually described the water cycle.  The other standards in other grade levels could have been "made" to fit into the water cycle but they didn't really fit what we were going for.  For this reason, we had to do a good bit of remaking our learning experience so it would fit a fifth grader rather than a first grader.
In this upcoming week, I would LOVE to really get a handle on my unit and decide exactly what direction my thoughts are going for that.  Once I can somewhat get my thoughts all out on paper, I would like to meet with Dr. Parker to see if all my thoughts are cohesive and working together in a way that would form a good unit.
This week, for our water cycle project I helped our group by being the "recorder" and kind of organizing all of our thoughts on paper.  I have recently found that organizing thoughts, making charts, making general plans, and making sense of ideas is one of my strong suites, so I hope that I was able to help my water cycle project team in that this week!
In looking for ideas for our water cycle project this week, I actually found a website with several awesome ideas of how to show examples of the water cycle to our students.  For example, the link: http://www.designeroptics.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=KSAngelisa_0S14_00_5115&gdffi=84d82f60f8c144ebb1fb886cd109bdaf&gdfms=FF922E6E98FA405EB76DAECD5AC970B8&gclid=Cj0KEQiA9ZXBBRC29cPdu7yuvrQBEiQAhyQZ9Ni0HDLkM6iQmaewXUydN1LKKWNXNw1qSPk8Lc4UanIaAhCA8P8HAQ has an awesome way to create your own "cloud" and show students that the water droplets actually do rise to form a "cloud," and then the cloud eventually rains back down to the "body of water."  This website contains tons of examples of how to show students the water cycle really does happen!
Something I found very interesting in the science world, is the fact that scientists may have come up with a way to use terahertz rather than x-rays for nearly the same purpose.  The wonderful thing about this discovery is that the terahertz are able to pass through objects much like x-rays without leaving harmful effects there for years to come.  This could be a future alternative to the well know x-ray machine! https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/09/170928142103.htm

The tweet above shows the effect of how we teach our students on their ability to get jobs.  This article revealed to us that an early emphasis on STEM gets students into the right mode of thinking.  This kick starts their learning for life and can have a direct impact on the jobs they are able to get in the future!

This tweet really stuck out to me this week because it shows how we are really suppose to get our kinds thinking.  Rather than seeing science as a sequential pattern that goes in the same order every single time, science is always happening, always changing, and sometimes never repeats the same pattern.  This example is of the transfer of energy but another example that is relevant to our current study is the water cycle.  Each droplet has its own journey that has no definite sequence to follow.

Gabrielle's tweet gives a little insight on what we were doing in class today!  We were given the materials to make a basic parachute and then alter the parachute to see if it would fall to the ground at a different rate.  Our group had some great ideas of how to create the different styles of parachutes and they all had varying fall times.  This is absolutely an experience that would show students a perfect example of air resistance. 

SCED Week Five

This week, I would have to say that I am most proud of how smoothly our attempt at the Science Fair project went.  Though we did have to change a few things around, the actual process of melting the objects was rather simple.  The main thing that we learned through this process was that often times the process of an experiment has to be retried and altered before it can give us the best results.
This week I encountered the most struggle with my unit plan.  It seemed like I would get a few words out but not like them and have to start all over.  The part that I was really having the most trouble with was the EU's.  However, today in class Dr. Parker compared them to generalizations and explained that they are basically the same thing.  This also helped me with the EQ's, of course, because they are tied so closely to the EU's.  I think that now that I have at least somewhat of a grasp on these and the Conceptual Lens, I should be able to get a move on my unit!
The aspect of my thinking that I am most satisfied this week is that I was actually enjoying exploring teacher pages on twitter and finding the articles related to education more interesting and more fun to read than any of the other things on twitter.  I have found myself clicking on articles just cause and really enjoying this form of "research."  It's almost like I actually am beginning to think like a teacher!
Over the next week, I hope to get the direction of my Unit exactly pinned down.  It is really time to move past the backspace and rewrite stage and move into the building off what I already have stage.
This week I tried to be a little more on top of tweeting things that I found to be beneficial to my classmates and wrote rather specifically above each retweet how that would be helpful.  I believe that using networking and social media is so important for me and my colleagues and I would love to see us improve in that area!
This week for my outside research, I found PDFs that contain examples of essential questions, and they are really helping me get my thoughts in order in regards to my unit plan.   They are http://pcs4thgrade.pbworks.com/f/EssentialQuestions.pdf and http://sbo.nn.k12.va.us/science/enduring_understanding.pdf
One of the most influential tweets I found this week was this one:

because it really shows the difference in how we used to ask our students to think and science class and how we like for them to think now!  This link takes us to an article that gives an in depth view of how we are able to take students' minds and shape them into thinking critically and scientifically.
Another great tweet I saw was:

This tweet was brought along because apparently it was talk like a pirate day! However, what the people did in this tweet was rather remarkable and quite creative.  They made some wonderful analogies to how our classroom should be run much like a pirate ship.
The final most influential tweet was:

As I said on twitter, we were literately just discussing the topic of this tweet earlier this morning.  We were discussing how we may find wonderful materials that give us the best ideas for learning experiences or just for different ways to teach, but unless we can align them very well with the standards for the grades we are teaching, they are essentially useless.

This week, I have personally really felt like we have been drilling on the fact that "Teachers know the content they teach" because I have learned a lot this week about the water cycle and even last week about hurricanes that I would have never known before.  This standard also goes on to say that teachers make learning relevant to their students.  How can we make learning relevant?  We make it apply to them as individuals in their lives.  We have discussed this over and over again in class this week.  We must make the students want to care about learning something by making it relevant to them!

One very interesting and health related aspect of science that I found myself looking into this week was how important it is for us to get exercise.  An article claiming that 1 in 12 lives could be saved with just a little physical activity.  The article can be found at 

https://www.livescience.com/60490-physical-activity-prevent-deaths.html
On my last note, I would just like to mention how shocked I am that so many students have no idea what science even is!!! I am just now having my eyes open to how very evident it is that science is a part of everything and everyone!

SCED Week Four

It only took four weeks, but it feels like I am finally beginning to settle into the semester!  And it is crazy to think that the end of September is already just around the corner!!  This week, I must say that I am quite proud of how my terrarium has really just taken root and sprouted up like crazy!  I also would like to brag on the fact that, as of right now, we have had no fish fatalities!  It is really cool to see how we, as college students get so excited over the terrariums and how well they are doing.  I can only imagine the excitement elementary schoolers would feel in doing a project of this nature.
A struggle I encountered this week was when I was working on part of our group science fair project and trying to organize the thoughts in my head that needed to be put down on paper.  It was really an eye opener to me about how intentional we have to be with our communication to our students.  They can not read our minds, and they shouldn't have to.  As educators, we should be able to display our thoughts thoroughly and clearly.
Over the next week, we must get together as a group and perform the procedure that we wrote this week for our science fair project.  We also may need to adjust the procedure we have written once we actually get into performing the task.
This week, I really tried to be an active participant in our in-class discussions such as our discussion on hurricanes.  I typically like to be the one who records information and thoughts in a group setting, but I also have found that I don't mind speaking out in classes as long as I am aware of what we are talking about. I suppose knowledge really is power!
Of course, the most commonly discussed current event in the science world right now are the many hurricanes that are spinning about and gaining power in the ocean, while some others are crashing on the land.  One thing we discussed in class this week was what to do when a student brings up a question that you actually have no idea what the answer is.  You allow them to discover!  This was a very important lesson for me to learn.  We must always be prepared, on our toes, and informed about the current events in the world, because someones mother or father more than likely is watching the news.  This current event questioning really showed me a new way that teachers are able to "facilitate learning."  Though we may not always be teaching the information, we should be able to facilitate the process in which students are learning.  An example would be how we broke down into groups in class this week and studied hurricane on our own then reported.
This week, I learned several new things about hurricanes that I would have likely never known otherwise.  I learned about why some are hurricanes and some are tropical cyclones.  I also learned how they begin and where they get their "fuel" to continue gaining power as they spin about in the ocean.
The first tweet I have to share this week is actually a link to an article.  The article was explaining a few ways we can begin to integrate NGSS into our everyday activities in the classroom.  There are pictures throughout the article accompanied by explanations of how that photo shows the integration of NGSS.

The next tweet I found interesting is one that gives a fun and easy example of how we are showing students what is expected of them every day.  We are taught that it is best to show students exactly what they are learning and exactly what they need to do to be successful in a lesson.  This is a cool example of how a teacher chose to display her expectations or the standards to her students.

My last tweet is one that I found the most beneficial.  This tweet is actually a link to a website that is full of all different kinds of webinars.  The listed in this tweet was explaining ways to create performance tasks that actually give students an understanding of the main standard.

This tweet actually showed me to my own personal research.  When I got into the website with the webinars, I was a tad overwhelmed, but I was so excited to see all of the different titles as I scrolled.  The one I chose to stop on, however, was on instructional modeling.  The makers of this webinar chose to make one that involves a teacher presenting a lesson in the correct form that we are suppose to be learning.
This week was not super stressful and I hope that I can keep things in check as the semester progresses! :)

SCED Week Three

This week, I caught a snake!  Sassy the snake was a perfect way to pique my interest of nature and our terrariums.  This week, I am most proud of the way that I have really taken an interest in science as more than a subject.  Last week really opened my eyes to how science is everywhere, and the Science Through my Lens project pushed my thinking even more in that direction.  The largest struggle I encountered this week was finding good questions to go with the photos I took for that assignment.  However, in the group message we have with our class, Mallory shared a link to a page that contains different question prompts and where those kinds of prompts would fall on Bloom's Taxonomy.  This was extremely helpful because I found it very difficult to come up with a range of questions, and I know the same questions over and over would bore students out of their minds.