Nick Paliswat

OH

Living in the Weather

Thu, Nov 01, 2018 12:43 PM
Weather Sci Guide

I found this guide to be very helpful in planning to teach a unit on the atmosphere. With covering the troposphere layer, we will certainly cover weather and climate as main ideas. I like that the guide is broken up into three areas, predicting weather, weather and climate basics, and weather, climate and humans. One thing I specifically found resourceful are the many links to websites that all cover a different aspect of weather and climate. Students can get real time data and look at historical data for weather and climate change. They did a wonderful job of breaking down their lesson plans with key timing information, objectives and specifically the standards assessed. I really appreciated that the first lesson plan included a 5E learning model to help students learn about the differences between weather and climate. The other lessons follow the same format breaking up the steps into different days in order to allow the students enough time to fully engage and explore through the activities.

Electric and Magnetic Forces

Thu, Nov 01, 2018 12:31 PM
Electric and Magnetic Force

This Sci Pack is a wonderful elaboration about electric and magnetic force. I specifically appreciate how detailed it was through every topic. I really liked that there was such a wide mix of strategies used to convey the information through playable readings, pictures, and interactives. I think the self check questions were great reviews as well as the multiple choice and selection questions mixed in. This is a fantastic resource for a teacher to use in a middle school setting in order to cover certain standards on these topics. The breaking down of each sections works very well to go step by step through the electric and magnetic concepts.

A Better Way of Farming

Mon, Oct 15, 2018 11:22 PM
Aquaponics Lesson

The article describes a wonderful lesson about incorporating a science and engineering task in the classroom by having students build an aquaponics system. The design of the lesson incorporates many core ideas of NGSS standards. The article includes a great task in engaging students in evidence based argument over different methods of farming. I particularly like the fact that students will each take a roll in the project, that they will keep a daily log of their design, and after the build of the aquaponics system, they are encourage to review their work and think about a redesign. There are a few areas in this activity I think that could be amended. This inquiry based activity is likely slated to take three weeks to complete which may be very difficult to pull off. I think scaling this back to a week or week and a half time frame is more reasonable. The core idea of the lesson is that we are saying alternative farming is more efficient and more effective at conserving resources than tradition farming methods. Outside of the evidence based argument, I think the lesson lacks any student gathered data from using the system to be able to compare it to data from conventional farming methods. They are basing the core idea off of mainly internet research and aren't getting to experience the real time data for themselves.