Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Science- Pebbles, Silt, and Sand
Since the beginning of the school year my second graders and I have been learning all about rocks. After putting science off for over a week, we finally got back to it today. The lesson today was to examine various types of sandpaper and discuss how rocks are used in everyday life. Since we had put off science for such a long period of time, I asked the students to review the types of rocks which we have previously studied. This was a great assessment of my students. Luckily the students were able to tell me all the rocks we have looked at and in order of size. I was very happy with what I heard! YAY! It is always nice to notice when the students have retain information which you have taught! This also reiterates the importance of activating prior knowledge on a consistent basis to have an ongoing assessment of the students.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
How exciting! We went over the rock sizes the other day also and it was great to see that many of the students remembered the sizes in order. (For the rest of you, Angela and I are doing the same science unit right now).
I've also talked a couple times about how sand or clay or silt is made. It's interesting, because that's a really big idea for this rock unit- that sand is made from bigger pieces of rock, but in the FOSS kit, it never really tells you to explicitly say that. At least I don't think it has.
I remember when I taught the Foss kit on Pebbles, Sand, and Silt to a 1/2 class at Happy Valley for my science practicum. It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot about the kids. I hope you are enjoying the unit. I am not teaching science in my classroom so I'm missing out on all the explorations. I'll have to drop in on my kids in the next room to get involved in science sometime along the way.
If you want to give your students a good visual on the sizes of sand, silt and pebbles (what happened to clay?) all you need is some soil, a quart canning jar and water. Put the soil and the water in the jar and shake. As the material settles to the bottom of the jar it will form layers of each material. This is something I did in school to understand how my soil composition at home. I also plan on doing this with my students before the end of the quarter.
We also did this FOSS kit in the 2nd grade class I was in last year. The kids really enjoyed it!
Activating prior knowledge is so important to helping kids be able to retain new concepts because they have something to connect the new concept too. By activating prior knowledge about a concept, like you said, also helps see where the students are at in understanding that information.
I loved doing Pebbles, silt, & sand! I hope you and your class had a good time!
Post a Comment