We Have LOTS of Energy!

We have been working hard on our energy unit. I have been very diligent in providing students with lots of different activities - from hands-on experiments to reading nonfiction texts - in order to provide them with authentic experiences through science. We love, love, love Bill Bye, but I do not like the idea of showing a video and throwing my hands up. We have some really good class discussions based on what we see in Bill Nye's videos! I have the students use sticky notes (which they LOVE) to write down a good piece of information that they learned from the video, and a question about something they saw or a concept they learned about. Then we talk. We talk about what we learned and we try our best to answer questions - even if we don't really know the answers. We talk about our hypotheses about the questions that we have and then over time, throughout the unit, we hopefully clear up any misconceptions. 

Getting students to think critically and to ask "juicy" questions is NOT an easy feat, people. It's a learned skill that takes a TON, TON, TON of practice. I am nowhere near where I want to be in this aspect. But I push my students more and more every day - I push them to explain more, to go deeper with what they are trying to convey, and to question everything that they learn about. Sometimes, it's so difficult for me to articulate to them what I want them to articulate! Ha! It's a vicious cycle that I continue to challenge both myself as well as my students!

Roller coasters lend themselves so very perfectly to energy. After all, without potential and kinetic energy, they wouldn't work. So I LOVE letting the students build their own roller coasters using some plastic tubing and a BB as their car. Then we talk about what in the world this has to do with energy. They LOVE coming up with elaborate coaster ideas! 

After the first day of roller coaster design, we get a little more involved with it. We start to design virtual roller coasters. I found a really great website that we use to do this - click here to check it out. And {most}of the time, they fail the first time around. Their car either flies off the track or it doesn't complete a loop, or it gets a poor safety rating. Failure is such a beautiful thing in science. Love it. It helps them LEARN! Once a failure occurs, I make them talk about WHY it failed {and what it has to do with energy} and then re-design their coaster. They love it, I love it, and everyone is happy, happy, happy.

Though there is so much MORE to roller coasters than just kinetic and potential energy, we don't really go there. I mean, come on, we're in fifth grade! However, it never ceases to amaze me how much this activity sparks so much curiosity in these kiddos. I hear things like, "What is velocity?" and "What does this have to do with gravity?" For those students, I lead them down the path that they can take in order to find the answers to these questions. I don't want to push this complex material on fifth graders, but I certainly support those students that are able to generate this type of thinking. 

Having so much fun in fifth grade science this year!!! If you have any good suggestions for books on critical thinking, post away. I welcome all the help that I can get! 

The Nature of Science

If you're anything like me, you're doing it wrong. Teaching science, that is. For the last two years as a science teacher, I have been on a quest for the best activities for "doing science". Hands-on, "fun", engaging, and meaningful are the words that I used to use to describe my lessons and activities. I read a ton of literature on how to get students to think like scientists and how to make my lessons focus on critical thinking. And it never really clicked. Until now.

FINALLY. I. Get. It. Science isn't something that you do. It's everything, all day, every day! Thinking critically is just a small part of science. What is critical thinking, anyway? There are so many different interpretations, but for me, critical thinking is just being able to independently solve problems that you face by using your background knowledge and whatever tools you have available to you. This starts with science, I believe! Scientists solve problems every day and it's important to teach students to think like scientists so that they can solve real world problems that they will inevitably face throughout their lives. Teaching students how to think like scientists really does change the way at which they look at life. It's all about getting students to be very curious about the world around them and to teach them how to ask testable, scientific questions. But for me, this isn't something that comes naturally as a teacher. I have to work at how I deliver the content to students. And it is so hard!!

Through reading, reading, and reading some more, I have been able to pinpoint some key strategies to help students. Prompting students with a very intriguing question is key. Developing that initial interest and curiosity is necessary in order to get students to really be interested in what they are doing is crucial to the main goal of the lesson. The next part is probing them with deeper questions until they start to probe the questions themselves. This will come over time and isn't something that happens overnight. Another big part of critical thinking is to provide students with just enough information to get them started and then BACK OFF! This is a very difficult concept for me because when a student comes to me with a question about what they are doing, it's so easy to just tell them the answer! But instead, it's so important to let students figure things out for themselves, let them ''do it¨ wrong so that they can learn from their mistakes. Even answering a question with a question is a good thing for developing critical thinking skills.

Though I started this year out VERY strong with these critical thinking skills, I let the difficulty of practicing this technique get the better of me and I haven't been as diligent with practicing these skills daily. So, after Spring Break, we are retracting a little. We are going to practice these science processing skills covering content that we've already learned about. We will just be taking it to a deeper level.

I have a very, very long way to go until I am by any means comfortable with this. But it really is all about growth and learning. I love it!!