I was pleased to find a fitting video that showed many things that would get students excited about biology class. My next step was developing activity that tie in the video to reading and writing in order to help develop science literacy skills. Here's what I came up with: After viewing the video, students select one type of organism (animal, plant, fungi, bacterium) to research further. They could even have an open ended research to get started, and narrow down their organism as they found information. I would request that they use a minimum of 3 resources, and would have to follow some of the write as you read science guidelines covered in the science and literacy article. For example: underline the main ideas or topic, place a dot next to the parts you want to remember, place question mark next to parts you don't understand, highlight the parts you find interesting, write notes about the information you want to remember, and so on.
After the initial search for information and the write-as-you-read activity, students could use Glogster to create an Organism Poster to show their classmates which organism they chose, and all of the interesting information, including pictures, they could find about their organism. I think as a student, I would find this sort of assignment interesting, as it would encourage me to read, research, and create. Next order of business: figuring out how to best use glogster!
Thoughts?
I think this is a great idea. You could also share this to parents, online at open house, etc. You could also collaborate with other schools. I think a collaboration with an environmental theme could be done with other schools as a kind of online environmental fair...even send them on to administrators and school board folk.....
ReplyDeleteI like your idea alot! The science and literacy article had some really good ideas to use, as you mentioned. I think it is also good, as you suggested, to ask the students to use a couple of those ideas - too many at one time would be overwhelming. My thought would be to introduce them a couple at a time, with the idea of covering them all by the end of the year. That way the students would have some good tools, and they could use what worked best for them.
ReplyDeleteLove the glogster idea too!