Rationale
There are two main objectives I have for this unit: The first is to renew students’ interest in science and the second is to teach students about the scientific process.
To renew students’ interest in science, I will be doing a few things; first, I am tying it to something all of my students love, food. In past years, I have done activities around cartography that involve cake. Students have been extremely motivated to learn the material due to the fact that they get to eat the finished projects. With about 75% of our student population on free and reduced lunch, I have found that food is something not easily accessible to them. Secondly, I will be allowing students access to hands-on discovery lessons. In previous years, their science experience has been based around reading a textbook and taking notes. More than half of my students are reading well below grade level. With a science curriculum based on reading a textbook, it is no wonder they are uninterested in the material. The majority of students who are reading below grade level do not have access to the text at all. Introducing them to a more collaborative, discussion based unit will benefit my low readers as well as the rest of the class.
My students do not understand the scientific process. The lack of practice doing hands-on experiments and discovery lessons has excluded them from the scientific process altogether. I believe that science is best learned when students are allowed to make a hypothesis, test it out, share with their peers and then make new predictions based on the experiment. I also want to allow them time to run the experiment again using the new information that they themselves, and their peers, gained from the experiment. The scientific process itself is imperative to understanding what the field of science is all about. My hope is that natural curiosity will spike and students will actively engage with the material.
Finally, I will incorporate a few more demonstrations that show a solid to a liquid, a liquid to a solid, a liquid to a gas, a gas to a liquid, solid to a gas and a gas to a solid. By allowing students the opportunity to make a hypothesis and test it, I will engage all students at every reading level in the scientific process and create a universal design for learning that will give each student access to the material. The main lesson will incorporate an engineering activity. Students will use a half cup of water and design a mold to freeze the water in order to design an ice of any shape to see which shape can last the longest before melting completely.
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