The Magnet Derby
Sat, Dec 09, 2017 12:09 PM
making science meaningful
The chapter called The Magnet Derby from the book More Everyday Science Mysteries: Stories for Inquiry-based Science Teaching is all about using the story of helping a young girl discover and understand magnetism through scientific exploration.
As a teacher, I can appreciate that the writing is laid out with the story at the beginning and then possible activities are broken down by grade levels. I also find it useful that after the story, there are background facts about magnetism that a teacher can share with their students to set the stage for an activity. The fact that this chapter includes ideas for different grade levels can also be useful as a way to differentiate instruction within a single class, perhaps assigning a more challenging activity to students at higher levels.
One thing that would have made this chapter a little more appealing to me would be to include examples of the charts that are described.
Overall, this chapter on discovering magnetism effectively uses the seemingly mysterious nature of magnets being able to physically move another object without touching them, to motivate a student to make their own hypothesis and test it. I feel this creates a science lesson where the student is able to take ownership of their learning and make it more meaningful to them