SCED Week 9

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.

This tweet stuck out to me because it it something that I have never even heard of before.  I have heard of formative assessment but never with the culture aspect involved.  After reading about it, I learned that the key points of it are first to learn how to promote equity and social justice as the focal point of NGSS implementation work by focusing on learning and teaching as an inherently cultural process. Then, we must develop a shared understanding of how cultural formative assessment can reveal the interests, experiences, and identities of students.