This month’s Science Teacher is a collection of ideas from low-tech card sorts (a wonderful way to get students thinking) to high-tech investigations that take advantage of technology.
The article “Fun with Ionic Compounds” was an enjoyable walk down memory lane. Many years ago, my colleague and I made cards such as these to help students visualize the concept of ionic bonding, and we found that it really helped the students. Sometimes we brought out the cards as a review, too. However, I like how these authors designed and used a review sheet to help students organize and summarize the activity. If I could only go back in time to do this again, I would use their ideas! For more information and activities on the topic of ionic bonding, log into SciLinks and enter “ionic” in the keyword search box to get lists of related websites.
Don’t forget to look at this months Science Scope, especially if you’re going to try the activity in the Modeling Muscles article to integrate a study of the skeletal and muscular systems. SS has a background article on the skeletal system that is probably designed for teachers, but high school students should be able to use the article, too. If you log into SciLinks and enter bones or muscles as keywords, you’ll get lists of related online resources. There is also an interesting activity “Making and Measuring a Model of a Salt Marsh.” This involves more than just making a model; the students’ models are used as a basis for making and graphing observations. If a salt marsh is not part of your students’ experiences, you could modify this to represent the plants and animals of freshwater wetlands.
I was observing some classes last year, and I noticed that some of the teachers referred to any hands-on activity as an “experiment,” even those activities that focused on making models, demonstrating a concept, or replicating investigations from textbooks or other resources. All of these can be valuable ways to help students learn. But I think we need to be careful with our vocabulary. You may want to check out the article “More Than One Way to Investigate” from this month’s Science and Children , which illustrates the differences between experimental and descriptive studies and how both are authentic ways to study science.
“My students are too busy to think!” When I heard a fellow teacher say this at a workshop, I hoped that she was exaggerating what was happening in her classroom. I envisioned a whirlwind in which the students followed directions for lots of activities with little time to summarize, reflect, or discuss what they were doing. I’ve been in classrooms where students were making models (DNA, atoms, the cell), but some of them really didn’t “get it” in terms of what the models meant or in applying what they were doing to other situations. Whether the students are making a model, doing an investigation from a textbook, or doing a true experiment, teachers need to help many of them to make connections between the hands-on activity and the students’ own experiences, previous activities or topics from class, or to later experiences. A few minutes of helping students to make some meaning of what they are doing can change being “busy” to being truly “engaged” with these activities.