Blog Post week 6

Week 6

    At the beginning of lab this week we checked our fast plants again to see their progress. Every fast plant had grown yellow flowers over the past week. Ours had grown so tall that it was falling over. These fast plants have been very cool to see over the past few weeks, they always grow past my expectations. 

                                           

    After, we finished our activity from last week on Jamboard. Our group focused on the tundra, and revised our Jamboard to the natural disaster of climate change. I think this is another great activity that can be used in elementary classrooms all the way from low elementary to eighth grade as it can be modified easily. Working hands-on with a group to become experts about an ecosystem and then getting to share expertise with the rest of the class is collaborative, fun, and efficient.

    We then used our knowledge from last week to complete an activity about turtles. We listened to the reading of a book giving us context for the activity and then used fortune tellers to play the game. This was a simple and fun game that I think could be modified to use in a range of different lessons. As the students, we were representing the survival rate of turtles, and the graphed line was able to interpret the data we represented. Our survival rate was 1/11, which is as close as we could have gotten to the real survival rate of 1/1000. From this, we were able to hypothesize that the reason turtles lay so many eggs is that there is such a low survival rate, if they didn't they would go extinct.  We also talked about ways we can help higher the survival rate and used a graphic organizer to condense all of these ideas. 

                                             

   We also filled out a worksheet about three-dimensional teaching, which helped me think more intentionally about our activities today. In this lesson we used the science and engineering practice of analyzing and interpreting data, the crosscutting concept was cause and effect, and our disciplinary core idea was interdependent relationships in ecosystems. As I've mentioned, I really enjoyed this lesson and was thinking of many different ways I could modify it to fit other lessons as well. I wonder if you could also extend some of these activities, such as the fortune teller game, into other subjects' lesson plans as well.