My Classes
In my classroom, I used an inquiry based approach to project-based learning. Students were given a driving phenomenon at the beginning of the unit that everything connected back to so they work constantly building on their own understanding. The unit that I spent my practicum experience planning was on contact forces. The driving phenomena I chose for this unit was an egg dropping and hitting the floor. We talked about why some objects break in a collision and why some don't, we discovered factors and variables that are important in a collision, and we discovered and analyzed patterns. The students were given two assessments in the unit, one was a checkpoint assessment that asked them to relate the knowledge they had learned to a sports collision. Despite that, the topic was never mentioned in class students are able to apply their knowledge to this new concept and explain what is happening based on what they learned through the hands-on experiences in the classroom.
The final summative assessment of the collisions unit was an egg drop project. Students were tasked with designing and building a better egg carton while following the given criteria and constraints of materials, and functionality. Students then had to write a prompted letter to an engineer explaining their design choice for both structures, and materials relating back to the scientific concepts they learned in class. They talked about equal forces, air resistance, mass, speed, and kinetic energy.
Students are able to collaborate together, share ideas safely, and explore new things because they are active participants in their own education. I utilize a driving question board that drives the investigations we do in class based on students' interests and questions. This allows for very engaging hands-on learning opportunities for students that seem to really improve their performance in class. I also utilize mini-lessons as fun activities to introduce harder skills so they have the opportunity to dive into them in a fun stress-free environment. My favorite example of this was my procedure writing mini-lesson where students were tasked with building. structure out of a random assortment of kinex and writing a procedure so that someone could build the exact structure.