hands-on science

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hands-on science
By Julianne

Hi,
This is too late for your Monday deadline. It's hard to plan in that short amount of time, isn't it? Anyway, for NEXT time, (and there's sure to be plenty of next times) you'll want to look about two to three weeks
ahead in your plans to give you time to gather what you'll need. If you pick your own units, try to do general planning about two months ahead, working to blend one theme into the next. For instance, your animals activity of Monday could be followed in the next few weeks with a lab on animal classification, then a lab on habitat, followed by a lab on changing weather, followed later

by a unit on freezing and thawing. See how the next unit flows from the previous one? There is no one way to do that. But it helps if you can build on the knowledge you left with the students last week. If someone else is in charge of picking your curriculum and timing, well, just try to find correlations where you can.

Next, look over what you want the students to know when they are finished with the lab. What parts of that could possibly come from hands-on activity? What parts would be difficult for hands-on learning? For instance, your students can build a pretend volcano and watch the stuff ooze downhill. But it would be difficult to provide a hands-on example of what the inside of a volcano looks like unless you had specialty equipment. So divide the possible from the impossible based on what materials and equipment you have access to.

Now decide if you want your students to work in small groups, individually, or as a whole. Try to design your experiments so that you can give simple directions and let them go. What kind of follow-up do you want them to do? What kinds of questions will you ask? What do you think THEY will ask? Get a feel for the time you will be spending with your hands-on portion.

Finally, decide what other components of your lesson you will need. Do you need a worksheet? A test? Will you be allowing open inquiry to generate the chance for follow-up experiments? Divide the entire lab experience into shorter time periods, writing down what you will be doing during each period. After doing this a time or two you'll get a good feel for how long things will take with your group. My first graders can zip through a water experiment in a couple of minutes. When I had kindergarten students the same experiment would take 15 minutes or more because the kindergarteners wanted to see it happen again and again. As they say in the ads, "Individual results may vary..."

Good luck and have fun!