Lesson Plans, They're Important!

A lesson plan in science is very important due to the nature of experimentation that will ussually be incorporated into the class. Experiments often have multiple outcomes or unforseen events. Jumping into this type of a lesson without a guide can lead to disaster.Using a lesson plan, a teacher is able to develop a sort of step by step guide that attempts to prevent the failure of a lesson. When applied to experiments in the class room, a lesson plan can be both a reminder on where you want your experiment to lead the students, and an outline for you to make sure that you are addressing all the problems that you wish to confront the students with. It is both a goal setter and a self check tool all rolled up into one. For instance, you would probably never willingly jump into an experiment unprepared. But how can prove that you are ready to administer the experiment? There are so many variables to take into account. Do you have all the materials you need, how about knowledge of the experiment's inner workings or various outcomes? What happens if your lesson ends up suffering from time constraints, unforseen events, or mischievous students? Completing a lesson plan before hand will allow you a better look at time management and even the more important details of the day if you end up having to cut some activities short. On the other hand, some other questions may pertain to you and how effectively you ahve done your job. Was the lesson understood successfully by the students? Did you end up accomplishing the goals of the lesson or experiment? Was the lesson appropriate and useful or was it just meaningless garbage? Or more importantly, do you understand what you just had your class do? Lesson plans provide a clear outline to make sure that your lesson conforms to the frameworks, and therefore is judged to be full of sufficent and effective material. They also make sure to outline the goals you have set for your students and the lesson, as well as provide an a tool to assess your lesson with.

The most important things to consider when writing a lesson plan for an elementary science lesson are the questions, "Is the lesson appropriate for the age group", "Is the lesson going to teach needed material", "What are the goals of the lesson", "Can the lesson and its concepts be easily understood by the class", "What resources will be needed to carry out the lesson", "What interuptions might come up that will negatively impact the lesson and how do I get around them", "Are any of the aspects of the lesson or experiment dangerous to the class and its members", "How will I carry out the lesson (from beginning to end)", "How do I know if the lesson was successful", "How do I know if I was successful"? This may seem to be a lot of questions to ask yourself. However, a lesson plan's format will ask most of these questions in one form or another. The point of the plan is to help make sure that you have addressed any possible problem that can be forseen in your lesson, and if a problem that is unforseen arises you will have sufficient material and planning to confront it.     

Online Science Teaching Source: Periodic Elements

I found a great source for showing all kinds of information about the periodic table and the elements. The site is called "The Periodic Table of Videos", and the url is: http://www.periodicvideos.com/index.htm. Basically, the site is a compilation of videos, and each video pertains to a certain element. Once you get to the main page, just click on any element you want to know more about and you will be shown a video on it. Most of the more common elements that would be introduced in a school curiculum (such as oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, etc.) all have parts of the clips dedicated to live experiments as well as interviews that provide factual information about the given element. As an added bonus, the main narrator has some really cool and wacked out hair! (Einstein, eat your heart out!). The only down side I see so far, is that some of the more uncommon elements (such as Uut, Uuq, and Uup) do not have video documentation containing live experiments (probably because these elements only last for a split second inside a lab), so they can get a little dry. However, they still do have narrations that give factual information about them. The publisher of this website is the University of Nottingham.  

(Told you he had some wacked out hair!)

I mainly wanted to reference this source for the periodic table, but there are secondary resources in their "extra videos" tab. This contains videos on a vast amount of things from frog poison to the lunar landing, and even a video on exploding cake (it's their chemists' way of dividing their B-day cake without using knives).

I originally found this site off of a site called "Mashable Social Media", which has an article entitled "10 Free Online Resources For Science Teachers". The Url is:   http://mashable.com/2010/12/16/science-teacher-resources/. So, if your having trouble finding a science teaching source there are nine more on the site.

Don't worry, It's all in the name of SCIENCE!

When it comes to my education in the field of science, i have to say it is by far one of the more memorable routes in schooling that i have ever walked down. Almost every project or hands on assignment i have had since elementary school science fairs can be easily recalled. I beilieve my first major science project was in fourth grade. Sure i had science activities before this, such as melting snow in kindergarden, but my project in fourth grade was the first major assignment i recieved that required me to set up and construct somthing that came from my own interests. The other major aspect about this project was that it would be my first time entering somthing into the school science fair. For me, this meant that no matter what i chose to come up with, it had to be impressive and it had to blow away all the other projects in my class. So, in the end, (with the aid of my father) i ended up doing my project on airplane propellers and how they are able to pull airplanes through the sky. In the end, i ended up with an amazing model airplane built from scratch and topped with a fully functioning propeller. With this model, I included the standard three sided display complete with illustrations of the mechanics and physics of proppeller driven flight. The project turned out to be everything i wanted it to be. The other children were very excited about my working airplane, and it felt great to be on top. However, when i look back on this project now, i can easily say that i never understood a single word that came out of any of the illustrations or concepts that i had done my project on. At the time, all that mattered was that i had a really awesome airplane to play with after school, and no other child in the world would have one that was just like mine. For a couple more years I did some other interesting projects such as building a flashlight or wiring a paper house so that every room had a working light in it. In fifth grade we started to use microscopes and examined microscopic worms that lived in vinegar, as well as some other life forms. However, it was not until sixth grade that one of my most favorite experiments occured...dissection! So far my science classes have had me disect owl pellets, worms, and frogs, but in sixth grade i got to disect a squid! This was a fantastic time. I learned so much about what could possibly be in diffrent species. For instance, i am still amazed that there is an organ in the squid (which has somthing to do with the expelling of their ink) that is completely translucent and feels exactly like the plastic that would be used for making pens. Until then, i believed that the only hard/solid matter in a body would be somthing like bone. I also learned that not every animal has blood like humans do, and that if you open a squids head the fluid that comes out is purple. To me, the lesson was comparable to doing an autopsy on an alien lifeform. After this event, there was a lull in the level of excitement the various science projects peaked in me. Many of them were fun, and they were definetly a lot of them, but nothing really of equal excitment happened again until I was in high school. When it did come back, through my sophmore chemistry teacher, it came back in full force. She taught us about various chemical reactions and bonds by throwing diffrent materials onto bunsen burners and into beakers of acid. Honestly, who dosn't like to see what happens when somthing is lit on fire? I can vividly remember the time when she was showing us the flammability of hydrogen by putting a lit match into an upsidedown testtube with some hydrogen in it. Let's just say we were never able to use that testtube again...(BOOM). For me science has always been about being hands on. However, it also has another important factor. All the experiments I enjoyed most, pushed the limits of what was ordinary. As a child, it feels pretty great to think that you're playing in the big leagues. Whether its disecting new creatures or burning various substances, a student of science feels like he/she is on the cutting edge when compared with the mundane experiments carried out in everyday life. So go do somthing wacky and creative like blowing up testtubes...just remember to record your observations!