• Science instruction driven by student curiosity
• Meaningful cooperative learning so students can benefit from their classmates ideas and knowledge
• Guided inquiry science learning and instruction- many experiences from which students can begin noticing patterns
• Lessons formulated on the Inquiry Application Instructional Model (I-AIM)

 

Plants Unit- This is a 10 day overview of a much longer plants unit and focuses on providing students with the opportunity to engage in guided inquiry science. It was created in collabaration with another 2nd grade intern.



Sample Lesson 1- This is an introduction to the parts of the seed. There is an emphasis on student exploration and setting students up for noticing patterns.



Sample Lesson 2- This lesson is an introduction to stems. It continues the earlier exploratory work and reinforces new ideas.



Student Artifacts- Work is included from both sample lessons as well as an assessment piece.



Assessment Analysis- Collecting data to determine what your students are learning/struggling with is an important aspect of refining one’s teaching practice. Here I have shown how I collect data in my classroom and detailed the changes that I plan on implementing to assist students with difficult concepts.



I-AIM Inquiry Model- This is a model created by professors at Michigan State that assists in sequencing lessons in a unit to follow the natural path of student inquiry.



Inquiry Lesson Sequence- This is part of a unit on geology. In this sequence, students were studying density and designing their own inquiry experiments to test what could alter the density of substances.