May
1
authentic learning
Posted by: Natasha Chiang | May 1, 2013 | Leave a Comment
This week I am feeling more confident in my role as the classroom teacher in my practicum classroom. We have covered much of our science curriculum in the month of April, and we are easing into a classroom newsroom experience for our language arts unit. I am now shifting my role from “the sage on the stage” to “the guide on the side”.
Today I planned an inquiry based lesson, where I took the students out to feel and capture the essence of a tree bark onto a piece of brown construction paper. We went outside and did some bark markings off a cluster of trees on our playground.
The students asked interesting questions such as, “Why is there moss growing on the tree?” “Why does moss grow on my ceiling too?” “Why is there sticky brown stuff on the bark?” “Why are there white marks on the tree bark?” “Why are there tree mussels on the trees?” “Why is the root such a big bump?” “Why do plants grow on this tree but not the other?” They also noticed some things such as the smoothness of the inside of a tree compared to the roughness of the outside bark. I reminded them that living things grow together, and depend on each other. We keep coming back to our big word, “interdependency”. One girl remarked, “These things all live together in the tree, and the trees hold hands, and that is interdependency.”