The Institute is designed to provide participants with the experience and opportunities to learn how to apply inquiry-based, three-dimensional science learning. Each session is comprised of three components Metacognition, Learning Architecture, Inquiry. Combined, these 3 distinct components provide an immersive three dimensional learning experience.
Your Inquiry experience will involve contextualizing science content through immersive, grade level relevant lessons designed to model 3D inquiry experiences that can be enacted in the PreK-3 classroom. These experiences will be a combination of you experiencing and discussing lessons as both a learner (student) and a teacher.
Teachers have a role to play – to prompt and push for systematicity and documentation and reflection on the process so that learners can go back through and examine what they did and be aware of how they reached their understandings.
As you read, consider these questions:
When we meet we will discuss the investigations described in this article and I will also ask you for examples of opportunities to analyze and interpret data YOU have had with children in your classrooms, and/or with your colleagues.
When have you:
Just for fun, some additional resources:
• about moon observations:
https://www.calacademy.org/educators/sciencenotebook-story-investigating-moon-phases
• about structure, form and function of animals:
https://www.generationgenius.com/structure-and-function-of-living-things/
• about investigating plants check out the materials available at
Background to this video: Hans Rosling (1948 – 2017), was a professor of international health at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden who also, with his son and daughter in law founded the non-profit “GapMinder,” organization that focuses on exploring and developing “new ways of explaining important global trends and proportions to make them easier to understand.”
In this video, over 120,000 separate data points were plotted and visualized so that we can examine the relationship between average life expectancy and income (by nation) between 1810 and 2009, almost 200 years.
After watching and thinking about this video, think about the following questions:
Some additional resources:
There is an interesting opportunity for some cross-curricular work with data for social studies on the basis of materials freely available at Gapminder.com.
This organization has a database of freely available video and photographs of families’ homes and possessions from the “Dollar Street” project – see https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street.
Exploration: Conduct investigations using pendulums. Document your investigations and collect data to explain your observations.
You will need the following materials: ruler, string, paperclips, washers or nuts
Note: If you did not get these items yet or with your materials, please improvise with household items.
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Welcome to Learning Architecture! For this first experience, you will…
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Calculators
Microscopes
Atoms
DNA
Flasks
Telescopes
Globes
Cubes