Great article for teaching rocks and minerals
In this article, a teacher who teaches in a high poverty district initiates a unit on identifying rocks and minerals as well as classifying renewable and nonrenewable resources. She has the ... See More
In this article, a teacher who teaches in a high poverty district initiates a unit on identifying rocks and minerals as well as classifying renewable and nonrenewable resources. She has the students share background knowledge and check their thoughts after a lesson on the content, and after this, they go on a yard hike to find materials to classify whether rocks, minerals, renewable, and nonrenewable resources (Yarema et al., 2014). The students classified their materials together and debated using their notes from the lesson on things that were disagreed upon until they came to a class consensus.
I do believe that this article has merit as it is written sharing the genuine experience of an educator as she works hard to build learning experiences for her students that will make the material more meaningful for them and more in-depth. The authors also cite standards from NGSS that the lesson sued as well as research to formulate the reasoning for the decisions this teacher made for the lesson. This article was straight-forward and stimulating. The article gave all the necessary information for another teacher to emulate this lesson in their own class. I teach rocks and minerals, so this was a helpful shift in thinking for me that I hope to bring into my classroom when we teach rocks and minerals. Having the standards from NGSS embedded into the article alongside the activities was also helpful in that it give appropriate information for teachers to use on their lesson plans when sharing these ideas with their team and administration.
I do believe that this information presented in the article is relevant as there are many children going to school in a low-income area that could benefit from their teachers taking the time to understand their background knowledge before lessons and then giving them chance to connect the learning to the world around them just like this teacher did with the yard hike. The only comment I have on how to adapt or improve this article would be to give some other activities that this teacher used in her unit to continue the learning or how she assessed at the end. I believe it would be helpful for educators to see the full picture.
References
Yarema, S., Grueber, D., & Ferreira, M. (2014). Learning science in cultural context: Resources from a school yard hike. Science and Children, 51(5).
Exploring Existing Resources Around Us
This article describes a new technique of teaching entitled situative learning in which teachers build bridges between the student and science by using student experiences as a resource rath... See More
This article describes a new technique of teaching entitled situative learning in which teachers build bridges between the student and science by using student experiences as a resource rather than as an obstacle. This is similar to the constructivist theory of teaching. Situative learning has four steps…(1) learn what the student knows, (2) gather information as a background for the investigation, (3) investigate, observe, and classify, and (4) student presentation and discussion of findings. This method of teaching worked well with an urban class studying resources.