Week 12 Blog 04/16/25

 

    This week I learned a lot about how important it is to explain the WHY to students and allow them to think about their own definitions first so that we can bridge their understanding. I believe that my understanding of how to explain topics like chemical reactions and properties of matter are much more strengthened as well when it comes to my future teaching as well. Lastly, I learned more about the different grade bands and how different the complexities are between the K-2 grade band and 3-5 grade bands. I learned that right now I feel a lot more confident with teaching K-2 concepts.

      I can apply our hands-on activity that we performed in our groups today to my future teaching. In my opinion, this activity covers a lot of bases when it comes to seeing properties of matter that cannot be observed. Additionally, I think that students being able to talk afterwards and find out what surprised them and make observations of the measurements throughout is so important. I want my students to be able to feel comfortable sharing what they are learning in a space that they can make predictions and potentially guess incorrectly too so they can learn!


    I found that trying to understand and come up with words that students may be thinking of tricky because I feel that sometimes it is still hard to explain concepts without potentially simplifying the concepts too much. Besides asking students what they think first, how do you come up with different words or phrases to allow students to work to make sense of new scientific vocabulary and concepts?


    


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