Forums

Hi, I need to write a lesson plan for a two week science project. It has to be suited for project based learning. Does anyone have any interesting ideas?

Hi Revital,
There are a couple of excellent resources within the Learning Center. The Science Teacher's November 2006 issue was devoted to PBL. There are about 8 articles covering a variety of content areas using PBL as the vehicle to teach each concept. You might get some ideas from perusing that journal.

Also, there is a discussion thread about PBL here: General Science and Teaching > Project Based Learning . Pam provided a word document of websites there and other participants shared their activities. I hope you might find some useful information in one of these two places. If not, perhaps others will come up with some specific ideas for you. Do you have a particular content area that you plan to focus in on?
Carolyn

Thank you so much for your reply.

Revital, One of my favorite NASA Educator guides is the Rockets Guide. http://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/topnav/materials/listbytype/Rockets.html Depending upon the age of your students the Project X-51 activities can be adapted from the water rockets for the compressed air paper rockets, balloon rockets or possibly straw rockets. The idea in its development is that the kids are assigned to interdisciplinary teams with engineering outcomes. The are mathematics and language skills woven into the science and engineering skills. Depending upon how big you want the project to be, you can have the students make presentations before the approval board that could include sketches or multimedia. Their budgets may be cut or increased based upon outcomes (which could be reflective of teamwork and desired behavior outcomes). There are a number of engineering design activities on the web that use simple and inexpensive materials. I had my students design a cardboard chair using no tape, glue or fasteners, other than those designed of the cardboard they were using. They were encouraged to test models with the final project tested in class. If it held me (a rather large individual) the team received bonus points. The students loved it and it helped to shape some of their positive peer interactions we had later in the semester.