Week 2

    This week in science we learned many different and new things! We started off our class by going over some notes and watching a few videos. Then we got into the good stuff! 

    The highlight of science this week was making an anchor chart, germinating seeds, and dissecting beans! My group members and I had a BLAST with all of these activities in class. 

    Our anchor chart was about the 8 different characteristics of living things! Those 8 characteristics consist of cellular composition, genetics and heredity, maintaining homeostasis, growth and change, movement, responds to stimuli, metabolism, and reproduction. After our group had compiled our different elements of our poster, we shared our work with the class and it was a hit. I also really enjoyed seeing our classmates posters! Everyone had the same topics but a different approach with pictures and descriptions. It was great to see what everyone had worked on! 

Here is a photo of Maci and I (one of my group members) in front of our characteristics of living things poster! 

    After making a super fun poster, we went on to creating a space to germinate seeds! We also watched a video that explained the process of how these seeds germinate. This was helpful information because as we follow our seeds journeys, we will know what stage of the germination process they are in. Right now our seeds are in red solo cups, filled with 6-7 cotton balls with 15-20 seeds! After we had set up our new home for our seeds, we lightly drizzled some water on them and placed our red solo cup in a light box so our seeds can grow! 

Here is a close up of our red solo cup with our cotton balls and seeds ready to be germinated!

Here is a picture of Cece (one of my group members) labeling our red solo cup and getting it ready to put into the light box! We can't wait to check on our seeds next week and weeks to come!

    After we finished with our seeds, we got to watch another video on seed germination. this led us into dissecting beans so we can match up each section of the bean with the sections of the seeds we saw in the video. This was also a lot of fun! I really enjoyed learning how to dissect a bean the right way, I know this sounds silly but you don't want to ruin your bean! We got to take the seed skin off, along with cutting the bean to find the different parts. 

Here you can see some of the seed skin and the different parts of the beans! After this we got a little carried away and cut the beans up into a million pieces XD

    As I refelct on what we did in class this week, I do not have any questions in regard to the lecture or the activities. I actually have a lot of background knowledge on most of the topics discussed in the lecture, along with the discussion. I have background in these topics just from being in elementary, high school, and even just recently in college. I think it is really awesome and makes learning much easier with some sort of foundation on certain topics. So, overall, most of the content that was covered this week was clear to me! I do not have any questions or concerns. 

    After going over all of the topics of discussion from our class times this week, I have seen many ways that I can apply what I've learned into teaching moments. I remember being so excited to learn about plants and life cycles as a kid. And even as an adult, I am having so much fun relearning these topics. I think that laying out all the information and having hands on activities for them, like this week in class, will help them learn SO much more. 

    I think that making posters and pictures will help students remember and engage themselves more on these topics. One idea that I can think of for my future students has to do with making the 8 characteristics of living things poster! Of course, I would give an introduction and inform my students of what the 8 characteristics of living things are. This will help them get a good foundation of what these characteristics are and help them create their portions of the poster!  I would give my students their own piece of paper, along with one of the characteristics. I would not tell my students who has what so they cannot copy each other. At the end, we would all come together with our pictures and make one big poster with everyone's different ideas and pictures. I have many other ideas of how these topics can be presented and taught, but that is just one of my ideas! 

To wrap things up, I really enjoyed the lessons and topics that were presented to us this week. I have no further questions considering these topics. Thanks for reading!