Maria Salazar-Perez

CA

Podcast: Force and Motion: Stop Faking It!: Orbiting Things

Tue, Feb 05, 2019 10:26 PM
Podcast - Orbit

This podcast, though informative, was very difficult for me to follow. I imagine that if I had listened to the entire series or had more background information that I would have understood more, but unfortunately, I did not have that prior knowledge. However, even though I was a little lost, I did appreciate that the presenter used the visual of the on-screen mouse. That made it easier for me to follow along. I believe that this would be an extremely useful resource as a set and would probably be used for higher middle school or high school levels. I would like to see this resource as a complete set because the video itself seemed like an incomplete part of a whole. I believe it would be easier to gauge how I could modify the content to fit the needs for my class, which is third grade, if the podcast came in a whole group format.

What Can You Learn From Fossils?

Tue, Feb 05, 2019 3:20 PM
Chapter 2 Review

This book is focused primarily on grades 5-8 but provides insight and instruction for engaging students in hands on activities that can be taken and modified for different grade levels, something that is mentioned in the introduction. Also, in the introduction, it was emphasized that grades 5-8 can be a crossroads for students regarding science; this is the age where students will decide whether or not they like science. The book as a whole contains 36 activities but the chapter I believe would be most useful for myself in third-grade science is chapter 2. Before the section on activities begins, chapter 2 opens with an explanation of scientific inquiry that, if explained to students, would be beneficial for students to fully understand scientific inquiry. The activities in chapter 2 contain the objective, procedure, and materials to conduct the activities. Some of the activities contain an analysis that encourage students to take the activity further. I will need to modify the activities and content to make it more comprehensible for my students, but having a resource that contains objective, procedure, and materials already included will save preparation time for myself and other teachers who use it.

The Early Years: Teaching Life Cycles Throughout the Year

Tue, Feb 05, 2019 1:30 PM
Teaching Life Cycles

This article is extremely useful in helping identify and addressing misconceptions and missteps educators may have when teaching the life cycle. The primary example used when teaching life cycle to students is using a type of butterfly. However, as the article points out, not all organisms have life cycles similar to that of a butterfly. Instead, educators should incorporate examples from the environment around students in order to make sure they fully understand that each organism has a life cycle, but they aren’t identical. One thing I found very interesting was the section that stated, “understanding the relationship between adult and baby is more important than learning the actual terms for animals’ offspring” (Ashbrook). The article does a good job of explaining why multiple examples of different organisms, not just animals like cats and dogs, benefits students more than just demonstrating one type of life cycle. The is also an activity to complete at the end of the article and all of the necessary resources are provided. As a third grade teacher, I could see myself modifying the activity to incorporate more English language arts skills or even math skills in the form of graphing the different stages in organisms’’ life cycles.