Today was the beginning of a great extended project, Method27. The entire project will be focused around matter. At the conclusion of the project, it is our goal for the students to design experiments that will help others determine if they are dealing with solids, liquids, or gases. I am working with Brittney Royal, 3rd Grade at Carver Elementary, over the next few weeks on building and modeling 21st Century Skills. Throughout the lessons the students will be learning how to research, conduct experiments, design experiments, analyze data, and work collaboratively.
Review of Day 1 Activities:
- Before visiting the classroom I built a website and a series of Google Docs that the students will use to enter the information they find during the research process. While the groups were determined by the teacher, each group has a leader and the group determined the roles of each member.
- The students met as a group to come up with a team name and record the members of the group on the GoogleDoc.
- The students used their group’s GoogleDoc and a set of links [1. Links were given to them to help expedited the initial research period.] to compose the definitions of solids, liquids, and gases. GoogleDocs allow multiple users to enter information on the same document at the same time. Google Docs are great for online communication and collaboration.
Next week’s goals:
We will complete our first experiment next week. We are going to work on making hypotheses and conclusions. After the experiment is complete, the students will be researching the science behind what took place during the experiment.
