Previous comments I have made

Comment on Kelly's blog from "Week 11"

Your lesson sounds like it went really well, and it seems like you incorporated a lot of the EPE framework into your lesson. Even though it was a social studies lesson, it still reminds me much about what we have been talking in science in terms of different approaches of teaching. The topic was new to your students, however you still used their experiences in economics to help them related the idea. You considered the problem that the students had not yet learned about the concept of supply and demand, and then called upon previous experiences to help them connect it to what they learned in your lesson, and see a pattern. The students saw the pattern that when demand is higher, so is the price, and when the supply is lower, the price is higher. The different groups that you split them up into provided the students with opportunities to collect and analyze patterns, rather than just giving them one example. When you gave the scenerio of the hurricane destroying the crop, it allowed students to share ideas about different shorts of explanations of what would happen in a case like this. This lesson shows how we can use models such as the 5 E’s, EPE and NSES Inquiry in a cross-curricular way!



From April 1 on Karen's blog

Wow! This day/week seems like it was very valuable and meaningful for the students in your placement class. This lesson actually reminds me a lot of the “Inquiry Begins with Looking Closely” article. The article discusses the usefullness in keeping a journal of observations “for children to share their wonders, or unanswered questions, about obersvations” (p5). The students in your placement had this same sort of opportunity. In the article, the “wonder journal” is a class journal, but I can still see the similarity in your student’s journals because they shared as a class after they had done individual work. However, I definitely agree that it would have been beneficial for the students to “generate questions about what they were seeing and explore possible answers to those questions through discussion.” It almost seems like the lesson was half complete. Do you know if they did this the next day when they were at the nature center? Did they keep a journal all week? Also, I really like the idea of the students going on a science field trip. I think that especially for science, field trips can make learning much more meaningful because students get hands-on experiences in an environment where what they are learning about is actually happening! I think this is a much than the students being in a classroom and rote learning facts about birds, or simply looking at pictures of birds. There is plenty of opportunity for incorporating the 5 E’s into a field trip like this.