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Week
7: Living Things
Weeks
7, 8, and 9 make up a three-week cycle about living things. Currently,
you are in Week A: Teacher As Researcher.
This week you should
refer to the resources listed under Readings & References, and you
need to complete the assignments listed under Assignments & Rubrics.
This week’s assignments focus on…
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Individual:
- Doing
an activity with your students.
- Building
a Terrarium Habitat
- Adding
Worms to a Terrarium Habitat
- Posting
reflections about what students learned from the activity.
- Responding
to teammates' reflections.
- Suggesting
criteria for effective concept-building activities.
Team
- Developing
criteria for effective concept-building activities and the learning
and teaching strategies that make them work.
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Readings & References
Read:
Earth is alive! You indeed live on a "living planet." Additionally,
people have developed the unique capacity to begin to understand both
the incredible wonder and the very delicate and intricate nature of this
web of life. While human understanding of this biosphere is often very
limited, you do live at a time where truly awesome, profound, and complex
models are providing dramatic new understandings of life as a complex
system or web that is directly and permanently connected to every other
Earth and universe system. You know that living organisms are constructed
primarily out of water, CO2, energy from
the sun, and a pinch of other elements. Thus, you immediately see that
life is a product of all of the spheres. In this three-week cycle you
will explore Earth's biosphere as one of several interconnected Earth
systems and also collaborate on developing ways of continuing and expanding
the knowledge of future generations.
What inquiries seem
to hold the greatest promise for helping K-4 students build a foundation
so that they may develop and expand profound understandings about the
living Earth as a complex, interconnected system of systems?
Recommended Web
Sites:
Assignments
& Rubrics
You will
work individually and in teams to address living things during this three-week
cycle. When doing this week's assignments, think about some possible answers
to the essential questions below.
- How do plants and
animals live and die?
- How do occurrences
in other spheres affect the life and death of plants and animals?
- How do plants and
animals affect the land?
- How do plants and
animals affect each other?
- How is decomposition
both an end and a beginning?
- How does the terrarium
support the life needs of the plants and animals?
Use
the links below to access the assignments and rubrics.
Week
A: Teacher As Researcher - Individual
Classroom Action Research Assignment
& Rubric
You will do an activity with your students, reflect on the provided
questions, reply to your teammates' reflections, and suggest criteria
for effective concept-building activities.
Week
7 Living Things Activities
Week
A: Teacher As Researcher - Team
Criteria-Building Assignment &
Rubric
You and your teammates will develop and agree on criteria for effective
concept-building activities.
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