Interactive Science | Interactive Notes- Light And Water

In this set of interactive notes students observe that: 1.money disappears, but then 2. it comes back doubled, 3.a pencil loses control of its lower half, and 4.a top-secret message can only be decoded with your students help! FREE Teacher Notes preview What are Interactive Notes?

Letting Go

To your great relief, none of our lessons will ask you to do everything for every student. In fact, you’ll notice a complete shift of who does what in our lessons. Students, not you, are the ones doing things. Your job is to stand back and make sure the outcomes are what they’re supposed to be, and then move in with dialogue when they’re ready. This may be uncomfortable for you at first. But the rewards are worth it.

By handing over the best part of the lesson to students- the demonstration- you are showing trust. Most students will respond to this by rewarding you (and themselves) with a higher level of maturity, and now everyone’s winning. In our lessons your role is to give students enough clear instruction so they know what to do. But always leave some “play” room that they will use to discover for themselves. Having come upon something amazing with their own hands, they will naturally go further and manipulate variables, enriching the discussion even more. That’s what science really is, and that’s what should be happening in a science classroom.

Being Busy

Do 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 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?

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.

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