Week Four- Plants

 

What question are we investigating?

For the fourth week of Science Methods I, we discussed the question: “How do plants get their mass?”. We did this through being in small groups to create a lesson based on the standard. After this we would discuss the ideas and create more questions we had from the activity. 

What did we do in lab to investigate this question?

The teacher started this lab by showing the whole group on how to get the standards through the website. She would pick the standard “3-LS1-1 Develop models to describe that organisms have unique and diverse life cycles but all have in common birth, growth, reproduction, and death”. Then she would explain how to create an anchoring phenomenon before starting a small group activity. We would have to research how to show this standard to student’s in the classroom setting. My small group would go with using a bunny to show the different life cycles. In a whole group discussion everyone would explain how they answered these questions. After that we would be given a survey over a plant in a bottle and this would help to create questions in as a whole group.

What did we figure out?

The teacher would make everyone take a survey over a plant in a bottle to see if we thought the mass would stay the same, be less, or have more mass. In the whole group discussion, we would go into what questions we could create for developing questions about plants. One of these questions was “What does a plant need to grow?’. We would investigate this in small groups through drawing a picture in small groups over thoughts of what is needed for a plant to grow. An example of this can be the sun and believing that the sun helps the plant to be able to grow.  

What are new or remaining questions after the investigation? 

This lab taught me how to start out a lesson for my future students. Before starting this lab I wouldn’t have known how to create a anchoring phenomenon and it helped me learn more about how to create developing questions too. However, the anchoring phenomenon was confusing at first in the small group to be able to create.