Ethan Schoenlein
Student

Examining Language To Capture Scientific Understandings: The Case of the Water Cycle

Sat, Oct 01, 2016 3:53 PM
Great Reference Piece

This article proved particularly useful in terms of knowing how to introduce complex ideas and concepts to children of a young age. At first pass, children may not have the specific scientific vocabulary required to grasp terms like "evaporation" immediately. This article does a good job of guiding teachers through giving their own introductory lessons (whether relevant to the water cycle or not) which may have higher-level concepts and/or challenging terminology. It stresses the importance of being able to apply the concepts to a child's everyday life by using terms and ideas that they can understand at their current level of vocabulary skills. It also gives some great ideas about vocabulary and science skill-building activities teachers can use to not only teach deeper science concepts, but every day lessons of any content area to boot. I actually read this article before designing a lesson plan to teach an introductory lesson about the water cycle to third graders. Using age-appropriate vocabulary, small group activities, multiple approaches, and real life applications as the article discusses produced great results for my own lesson.

Cell Division and Differentiation: Continuity of Life

Sat, Oct 01, 2016 2:19 PM
An Excellent Refresher

After completing this Sci-Pack, I can say with complete confidence that I will be infinitely more confident should I ever have to teach any content related to cells, cell structure, cell cycle, and even the causes of some types of tumors. We see over and over again students of early childhood education asking "when will I ever have to use this?" This is a shame because, even if you aren't teaching your kindergartners about cell division, they may ask you more baseline knowledge-based questions like "what makes this plant grow?" To answer these types of scientific questions, which seem simple on the surface but stem from a much deeper region of science, we must appropriately respond using our deeper understanding of the related concepts. This Sci-Pack did a fantastic job of refreshing my prior knowledge on the subject and even adding some real-life application.After completing this, I am more than ready to answer questions related to this content area.