Week 11- Different Stations over Matter and Interactions

 What question are we investigating?

For the eleventh week of Science Methods I, we would look at the question: “How can we support elementary students in learning about matter and its interactions?”. We did this through rotating in small groups to different stations over the interactions that could happen with matter. Then we would talk in a whole group about different ways of thinking over the different stations. This would allow people to find out what they already know on how to teach elementary students over matter and their interactions or what they want to learn within the class. 

What did we do in lab to investigate this question?

The teacher started by explaining the different stations we would be doing and said to be curious over talking in small groups over the different questions about why something happened in that particular station. My small group would talk about what we thought would happen before doing the experiment like the M&M’s put in water. We would use prior knowledge from different science classes like chemistry to come up with answers and sometimes already do these experiments. An example of one of the stations that gave me confusion can be the Coke Float station. We believed that the mini or big cans would float because of the different sizes. However, this wouldn’t be the case at all and it would raise a lot more questions we had. I personally thought that maybe there was something different in the original Coke cans to allow it to float. But some of my group members then asked why the mini original Coke could not float then and I thought maybe there wasn’t enough that made up the difference to allow it to float.

What did we figure out?

Another part of the class in small groups was to talk about the different things we already know about teaching children in the classroom and specifically for science. We also would write down the information we want to learn from this part in Science Methods I over teaching it to children. Eventually, we would go into the whole group and talk about the thoughts we had over teaching children in the classroom with science. The teacher would write down thoughts on the Smartboard when we respond to them. An example of this can be prior knowledge and having information over using this in the classroom when thinking of ways to teach different science concepts to the students. However, my small group was curious to learn more about how to get students still interested in learning about science if you don’t tell them the answers. 

What are new or remaining questions after the investigation? 

This lab taught me about the importance of allowing the students to come up with their own thoughts over something like the Coke cans floating or not. This will allow the students to get more curious over the information you are teaching them over it and come up with their own opinions. It also would allow me to think of not using the same experiments each time with the students in your classroom. It also allows me to still have different questions over some of the stations we did in class like the Coke Float and get more curious to learn more about it.