This week I taught the processing skill of communicating to my students. I posed the essential question, had students turn and talk about why it is important for scientists to communicate and what exactly does it mean to communicate. After they shared their thoughts, I had a few students share what their partner said. After calling a few students, I added in that communicating is when scientists share and listen to each others ideas. Communicating isn't just talking, but that communicating goes both ways of talking and listening. The students learned that communicating isn't just through oral conversation either, but can be through graphs, notebooking, pictures, and more. In my communicating lesson, I told students that they were going to observe an object, but that object was for them to know and to keep a secret because tomorrow we are going to have our classmates try to figure out what our objects are through our observation data. The students were each given a shell or a rock and they all looked different and had to write as much detail and descriptions as possible about their object. We let them use rulers and magnifying glasses to more accurate observations as well. Once the students had used their 5 senses to observe and drew and label their picture, science was over for that day. The following day, I have 3 student comes up and read their descriptions and see if their classmates could guess which object was theirs. In order too not take up too much time, after those few students we had the students turn and talk and share their description and see if their partner could pick out their object. The students learned that communication is important in order for other scientists to understand what you are talking about. Allison, my science content coach, was in my classroom for day 1 of the communicating lesson and she had nothing but positive things to say about my lesson, which made me feel great. I think my management of passing out materials has improved, which is something I've been consciously working on getting better at. |