October 14th and October 16

In these two class days, we basically had work days for our Video Midterm project. Carrie Dunn and I are doing an activity with the class on taste buds. We will be experimenting with the different taste buds on the tongue, whether it be salty, bitter, sour, or sweet. Then we will also be showing a video on things not to do with your students during a science experiment. When the we are closing with our hands-on activity we will be having the class chose their favorite flavors and intergrating math into our lesson by building a class graph, called "Which Jelly Belly is on the Tip of your Tongue." On Oct. 16th we also discussed the Science Fair Judging Day, and the requirements needed for that day.

Cyber Bee October 9th

For Thursday assignment we were asked to look around the "Cyber Bee" website. I thought it was very interesting, I really liked the different cirriculum ideas. It also has alot of different activities on the interent, like treasure hunts. I tried it out for a little bit, and it was really intersting. I didn't really see anything directed towards science. This program would be so helpful when i start out my own classroom, it has some great activities, articles, how to's, and treasure hunts.

October 7th, 2008 and Mirror Image activity

In today's lecture we learned alot about safety and how we need to use it in our classrooms. If we do not use safety in our classrooms, it could potentially be very dangerous. We need to teach our students how to protect their clothing, eyes, and make sure we have directions placed within the classroom. It is very important for the students to know those safety percautions, they can easily learn them by signs in the classroom or safety quizzes. We as teachers should always be ALERT, we should also have an organized and disciplined classroom, and know that not every activity will work. We also did an activity today in class, it was called Mirror Image. To begin the activity you should have students turn to the mirror and try to write names, phrases, or shapes in the mirror image. Each student would be given a notecard and a mirror. First they would poke a hole in their notecard and put their pen or pencil in that hole. Without looking at what you are writing, you should be looking in the mirror and try to write something in the mirror image. It is extremely hard. After experimenting students san share their results as a small group.

October 2nd, 2008 and Plato's Allegory of the Cave

In today's discussion we started off with questions as always. We then started with a powerpoint on how children's mind's develop over time and how we can use this to teach of future students. We also discussed how should we know how one can recognize the knowledge that a child has. We should base lessons and theories on how children learn, and take into account their culture and hertitage. For our class activity, which went along with the movie we watched, we did Plato's Allegory of the Cave. In this activity each group was given four black boxes, with a mystery object inside of it. We all had to make assumptions on what we thought was in the box and what we thought it was like. We then wrote our assumptions doen on a piece of paper, and then correlated all of our answers together to get a couple solid assumptions about what we thought was in the "mystery boxes." Our group guessed that the four boxes held marbles in them, because of the way they rolled within the boxes. But we were also asked to predict and guess what else was inside, but what we didn't know was that there were little square objects attached to the box, kind of like an obstacle course or something. As a class we discussed our predictions and found out the answers.

NSTA Web Seminar

Since I was unable to attend the web seminar on the announced day, I am doing a post seminar assignment for Dr. Cathy Ezrailson. Through this presentation, I learned that stars are made up of about 80 percent of Hydrogen, about 30 percent of Helium, and about 2 percent of a variety of different types of metals. By looking at the models presented through out the presentation, we can see that stars are a hot and glowing balls of gas. We are also trying to find an equilibrium between gravity and energy. As the pressure if trying to force its way out, the gravity is trying to force its way in hence we are trying to discover a balance or a state of equilibrium. As Dr. Ezrailson said during the presentation, when we are thinking about how stars are formed, we should consider the mass of the initial gas, the temperature, and the speed. I learned that the life and death of a star is dependent on whether how much gas life they have and how quickly they use their gas through out their life span. There are also different ways to classify stars. We can classify stars by their temperature, composition, and brightness (low or high). If we were wondering how to figure out the energy we can receive from light, we could use a formula to find out a photons energy and frequency. The formula is E=hv, which is very confusing to me. I do not understand the scientific terms that allow me to go further into that formula. It would be interesting to see how the formula plays out and how I could incorporate it into my classroom, and teach my students about light energy and how we can get it from the stars. I also found it very interesting how planets form around the stars, this would also be an interesting topic of discussion for an elementary classroom. We could eventually have the students make their own solar system, and as we slowly build we can talk about the f ormations and other aspects of planets and stars.

September 30th, 2008

We had our class online today! For our online assignment, we were asked to answer questions from chapter (modules) 3 and 4. We were asked to share our ideas on how educators harness young children's shared base of understanding and skill to help them learn science, how misconceptions help children learn science, and a couple other questions about the scenarios that are placed in each module. Through these questions we learned that children are natural learners/scientists, and they are always ready to learn at that young of an age. They also have a rich knowledge of how the world works and using cause and effect. By using hands on experiments we can help put science into a different perspective and help them build those great connections. By learning from their misconceptions, students are able to use those a stepping stones. Those misconceptions can lead to one big idea and they can build off of their ideas and also make more connections. We also to analyze a couple of class experiements and how they were effective and what we would change about them. For this assignment we also got to put ourselves in the shoes of parents, and how we would like to be incorporated into our children's learning. From reading the chapters (modules) we can learn alot and can get a lot of great ideas to use in our classroom instruction.

September 25th, 2008

Today we were to have an Online Seminar, I was unable to attend because of a conflict.. I will be making this assignment up later.