Blog Week 4

9/11/2023

Big Question: How can we support play that's exciting but not dangerous? What affects how long it takes a swing to go back and forth?

• In lab, after meeting with our peers to discuss School of the Wild lesson plans we reviewed our takeaways from our recently assigned article. These takeaways we were able to connect to what our lessons may look like at School of the Wild. Then, we began our warm-up activity with the water color wheel. With this activity, we were able to practice the I Notice, I Wonder, I Discovered strategy. We also discussed how we could differentiate for this lesson, specifically for high achieving students if they had spare time, which I appreciated. 
• Then we completed our pendulum/swings lesson, which began with a formative assessment. This was used as a tool for the professor to see where we were at, as well as a tool for us to reflect throughout the lesson as to how are answers may have changed.
• Then we partnered up and completed an experiment on pendulums where we looked at the effect of weight on the swing. We found that weight does not affect the pendulums, which was not what we had first hypothesized. Many of our answers as to why the weight did not affect the swing came from the lecture on Thursday.
• In lecture, we began by discussing the forces that act on a swing (gravity, friction, air resistance). This led to a discussion of Newton's first and second laws, to make sense of why the swings will always go the same direction, and why the weight of the rider does not matter. The last thing we looked at is what energy looks like in pendulums (kinetic and potential). We were able to discuss this in relation to the experiment we conducted in lab, as well as observe it in an online module. I thought it was helpful to have this discussion after observing it in real-time, then flowing into the "science" of it, and finally looking at a slowed-down online model of it.