I am currently enrolled in science and math methods. I am doing my math practicum in kindergarten and my science practicum in sixth grade. While in my kindergarten class, I asked the teacher how she makes science fun for her students. She told me anything hands on. I had already thought about this hands on idea because I love anything hands on for the students. Being able to actually take part in an activity or experiment using their hands enhances the student's comprehension and thus furthers their learning.
I started searching the internet for some hands on activities. Turns out, there are a lot of them! This particular web site I found very easy to follow and full of good hands on activities. Go to http://ee.user.edu/webweather/activities.html This web site has great ideas about our weather. I think that students in elementary grades would find these activities fun and they can relate the activity to their every day life.
One of the activities is making fog in a glass jar. How many times have you wondered how fog is made? I have! I like these activities because the students can relate to them. Every day our weather is different in Iowa. We have four seasons and each day our weather is different from the day before.
Yes, the students can learn about the weather they see out their window. In Iowa we may not fully understand what a hurricane is but because we have a background knowledge of tornadoes and thunderstorms, the students can make a connection and understand and learn a little more about hurricanes. This background knowledge will further their understanding of hurricanes and the next time they are watching the news and a reporter is reporting on a hurricane off the coast of Mexico, the students can make a real life, every day connection to that story.
Hands on is a great way to teach and make science fun for you and the students. Push your sleeves up and dig in to the science fun!
You are right that hands-on activities are very fun and useful, and I like that you made sure to mention that linking it to their everday life is important. However, I would like to point out a great article that we had to read for our science methods class that talks about how many teachers do multiple hands-on activities that don't really link to each other and they are usually cut and dry in the fact that they have a certain procedure to follow. It proposes using science inquiry activities also because it focuses an investigation on student's interests and questions. The article is very interesting and informative, and I recommend reading it. It is titled Shifting from Activitymania from the science and children journal (January 1998).
ReplyDeleteNancy,
ReplyDeleteWeather is a great example of a hands-on type of learning experience. In fact, for one of my science methods assignments we had to do a "Generate an Argument" activity. I chose to do a weather project. To summarize, part of the activity was to have the students take daily weather readings: temperature, rainfall measurements, wind speed and direction, humidity, barometric pressure, cloud cover and cloud type observations. This is actual "hands-on" learning. If you start this in your class I guarantee you'll have kids jumping out of their seats to be the one that gets to go outside to do the daily readings. And what better way to supplement a unit on weather and climate than to have them experience it first hand! The readings also serve another purpose - they can be used to make forecasts for the next few days. What fun it would be to see how accurate they can predict the weather. They can't be much worse than the professional forecasters. Just kidding.
I like you outlook on a “hands on” approach for science. This will work great especially for kindergarten. I was a little surprised that you didn’t mention anything about the thinking process when doing these activities. For example: what types of questions would you ask to get into student’s schemas and engage them in thinking about the topic of weather? We talk so much about the benefits of higher-level thinking in our methods class. You and I both know the importance of students discussing and reflecting on activities they do in class.
ReplyDelete