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- Reviews
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Recent Reviews by Meghan

What Happens to Animals during Hurricanes?
Tue, Oct 02, 2018 12:38 PM
Article Review
I am currently in the fourth year of my studies as an education major. I found this source to be helpful with my planning of my first unit on hurricanes. I am teaching my unit in a 6th grade classroom. My unit will begin with a focus on how animals are affected by hurricanes and what humans can do to help them and prevent them from dying. While a large part of this article focuses on ocean life and coral reefs, I still found it helpful how Marti Welch wrote about how we can open up students curiosity by beginning science units by talking about animals. He writes about how important it is to get students passionate about a subject before you try to have them do work and learn about it. This I agree with, the students in my classroom are ten times more productive when they are engaged and excited about a topic.
While I did enjoy Mr. Welch’s connection of animals to engaging students, I found this article to be a little technical toward the middle, and a little hard to incorporate many of the facts into teaching. This article to me seems like it would be more helpful in teaching a larger unit about all animals and organisms that are affected by hurricanes and general bad weather across the earth. Still I did appreciate Mr. Welch’s ideas that he generated for this article on how to connect this learning to outside of the classroom. He mentions toward the end that an extension can be having students clean up their local parks which is a very important real world connection in my opinion.

What Happens to Animals during Hurricanes?
Tue, Oct 02, 2018 12:38 PM
Article Review
I am currently in the fourth year of my studies as an education major. I found this source to be helpful with my planning of my first unit on hurricanes. I am teaching my unit in a 6th grade classroom. My unit will begin with a focus on how animals are affected by hurricanes and what humans can do to help them and prevent them from dying. While a large part of this article focuses on ocean life and coral reefs, I still found it helpful how Marti Welch wrote about how we can open up students curiosity by beginning science units by talking about animals. He writes about how important it is to get students passionate about a subject before you try to have them do work and learn about it. This I agree with, the students in my classroom are ten times more productive when they are engaged and excited about a topic.
While I did enjoy Mr. Welch’s connection of animals to engaging students, I found this article to be a little technical toward the middle, and a little hard to incorporate many of the facts into teaching. This article to me seems like it would be more helpful in teaching a larger unit about all animals and organisms that are affected by hurricanes and general bad weather across the earth. Still I did appreciate Mr. Welch’s ideas that he generated for this article on how to connect this learning to outside of the classroom. He mentions toward the end that an extension can be having students clean up their local parks which is a very important real world connection in my opinion.

Dig Into Fossils!
Mon, Oct 23, 2017 4:09 PM
Review of "Dig into Fossils" journal article
I chose to read this article in hopes that it would give me ideas for my current fossil unit that I am teaching in my elementary methods program. This article gave me numerous ideas for activities that I could do within my classroom. The first activity which I found intriguing was the activity for the first day of teaching. This activity is similar to what I taught within my own lesson. It focuses on having the students observe real life fossils, and detail how they observed them. As in with what senses they observed them with. I liked how the person giveing this lesson checked for initial knowledge as well by asking the students who knew what a fossil was or a paleontologist. It was described that half of the students knew what a fossil was and half knew what a paleontologist was. This is a manageable level of learning to start at for the students in this classroom.
I also liked how within the second lesson the person teaching gave the students opportunity to rotate between several stations and view different types of fossils. Part of the lesson also includes the teacher giving the students fossils and asking the to observe and draw what they see. I thought that these lessons were very well put together, and the way one draws from the one before it causes them to smoothly from one lesson to the next.
View all reviews by Meghan