For your blog entry this week, share your experience of implementing your Modeling Earth Scienceinstructional plan with your colleagues. How did the use of a model work for you and your students? Share the triumphs and challenges of using models in an effort to support student understanding of complex science concepts.
For this week's model lesson, we did a learning lesson on Stream Tables and the concepts of erosion and deposition. The students really enjoyed the hands-on learning built within the lesson.
Having the students understand the ideas of erosion and deposition was the easy part of the lesson, the challenging portion of the lesson was getting the students to relate to the real world context was the difficult part. For some of my lower learners, they had a hard time seeing how erosion, and the Colorado River have created the modern day Grand Canyon, many of them didn't see it as being possible. The biggest issue was the time (millions of years), many of the students thought this was a process that took two hundred years to take place, so getting them to understand how the earth was shaped over this long course of time was a challenge. Yet, using the stream tables was a great visual for them to learn from.
Overall though, I was very please with how the lesson went from start to finish, my classroom area is very small to do hands-on learning tasks and the students working with water and earth materials for this lesson did an outstanding job, and I can say today that the floor is still spotless.
