Olga's Elementary Science Methods 1/2 Blog

                                                                                    Elementary Science II Week: October 28th - November 1st  What did you do in lab this week? / What was the big question?  We started lab by taking a formative assessment about rocks, the big question is what is a rock? Then we talked in our groups about assessments. We asked ourselves how do we assess students and what do there results tell us about their learning. This made us reflect a lot on our education and how will we change that for our future students. As we talked in class, we just learn something to get an A on a exam and move on. On paper it looks good but in reality you are not learning, challenging and engaging with the material. Then we...

    Elementary Science II Week: October 21th - October 25st  What did you do in lab this week? / What was the big question?  The two discussion topics for this week's lab is geologic time and earth viewer. We began by looking at a presidential elections are impacted by a 100 years old coastline. We learned that parts of the south were underwater as a point in history, flowing the blue line. Then as a class we got to place events on a number line ranging from humans appeared to moon was created. This allowed use to visual see how far away it took earth to become what it is now. It also helps break the misconception that after the big bang earth just appeared. Now that we have learned many things about our universe we answer the question on how to now placed them in order. If we put  all the formations of the Earth on a time line humans have only been part of the timeline for 2 million years.     Answer questions about the weekly text books readings...

                                                                             Elementary Science II Week: October 14th - October 18st  1. What did you do in lab this week? / What was the big question?  My group's big research question was about the earth's origin. There are so many misconceptions about how the Earth was made, for example, the Earth was formed instantly. Historically people used to believe that the Earth was the center of the world. We learned that current science understands that Earth is 4.65 billion years old thanks to geology and fossil studies we were able to set a date for the Earth.  We also got to hear from other groups about the origin of the Universe, the lifecycles of stars, galaxies, Black holes, and exploration of spa...

                                                                    Elementary Science II Week: September 30th - October 1st  1. What did you do in lab this week?  We started class of by taking 2 formative assessments and then in groups picked out what topic we want to present about. My group will be presenting Monday over the Origin of the Earth. Then we had a class discussion about the homework video we had where college and high school students were asked about the moon phases.  Our big lab activity was to build a physical scale model of the sun and the 4 inner planets, including our moon. This might we have to scale everything and measure distance. If you can from the third pictures below we underestimated wrong. So we had to ...

 Elementary Science II Week: September 30th - October 1st  1. What did you do in lab this week?  We started a new unit that is called Earth, Moon, and Stars. After we took a 5-question quiz to determine what we know. Then we had to answer three questions with just the knowledge we had. How does the phase of the moon occur? I think that the moon's phases occur because of the world's orbits, as the world turns the sun affects the moon's shape. What causes the seasons? Because the world is shifting ??? What causes a lunar eclipse ? Once a year the sun and moon are both in the sky and start the rotation again.  It was challenging to answer these questions because the last time I remember talking about the moon phases was in 5th grade. We would go outside to trace our shadows and then have a class discussion on why sometimes we have shadows. In groups, we would talk about our answers and then use the class materials to answer the questions.   2. What was the bi...