Title: Wacky Weather WebQuest: Typhoons Grade Level: 4
Rationale
The lesson is situated within a fourth grade science unit on weather. Students have spent time learning about and measuring different aspects of weather. They will now engage in a project-based inquiry focused on typhoons which are real-world phenomena in Hong Kong where the students live. Specifically they will be investigating how a typhoon affects living and non-living things. This investigation will lead to an artifact, a presentation to a organization or group of the students’ choice about how to effectively prepare for and stay safe in a typhoon. The purpose of this lesson is to give the students the knowledge that they need to create their artifact.
Constructivist Elements At A Glance
The lesson is a blended learning situation. It is created for a contained classroom and blends face-to-face with online elements. It employs two constructivist strategies of project-based learning and WebQuests. The WebQuest is short-term (Dodge, 1997), which allows students to wrestle with and make sense of information. As part of a greater project-based strategy, the WebQuest will become long-term (Dodge, 1997), allowing students to refine and demonstrate an understanding of their knowledge through an artifact that elicits a response from others. The artifact creation is not part of this lesson.
I have developed this lesson based on Driver’s (Matthews, 1994) Constructivist Instructional Model (CIM), with enhancements from White and Gunstone’s (1982) Predict-Observe-Explain (POE) and Posner et al.’s, (1982) Conceptual Change (CCM) models.