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Interactive Science | Interactive Notes- Forces
Reaching EveryoneWhen you stop and think about it, teaching is quite scary. You’re standing in front of 30 young people. Some are having a good day, others bad. You have varying attention spans to deal with (thanks in part to video games, television, and cell phones). There are high and low achievers- a future ivy league student could be sitting next to a soon-to-be dropout. This realization is sobering and it reminds us who we serve and how awesome our task is. And your task is to come up with a lesson that will be meaningful to each and every one of these students. Wow! (Don’t think about this too long because it will turn your attitude negative, and you’ll convince yourself that you can’t teach them all). So how in the world can you make “Plate Tectonics” or “DNA” meaningful to everyone? We think you should begin by putting a good demonstration in their hands, which will pull them all in. The percent of students who enjoy doing the demonstrations themselves is about the same as those who enjoy getting presents at Christmas. That leaves a door open for you to follow with a discussion to “hang” ideas and concepts all over that demonstration just like you were hanging ornaments on a Christmas tree. Being BusyDo you remember the magician from Frosty The Snowman? He was so “busy, busy, busy!”. That describes Americans today- always in a hurry trying to accomplish more than we have time for. But things done in a hurry are seldom done well, and that includes in our classrooms as well. Being busy is not in itself a bad thing, and having more activities than we have time for should theoretically result in a better learning environment since we should be choosing the best and most effective lessons from the list (we’ll call this the natural selection of lesson plans). But sometimes activities
Our Interactive lessons take a balanced approach. They don’t try to go all directions at once, nor is it all fluff and fun. There is terminology, but we also want to develop the creative and practical part of each student’s mind. Each lesson stays steadily focused on just 1 thing or theme from beginning to end. They tend to be more simple and quiet, so that your students can keep a sustained thought, and actually have some room left over in their minds to think creatively and to explore. Other Physical Science Lessons | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
are done just for the sake of doing them, and if most of what we’re “teaching” our students will soon be forgotten, then what’s the point of even doing it?