Rationale:
As a cycle one teacher and from my teaching practice, I noticed that students suffer most with the Science subject. As sciences are usually hard to comprehend specially at early stages. Although according to piaget‟s cognitive development theory (Migget, 2006) children at this primary stage accept large amounts of knowledge, Science remains to be a hard area to tackle. My main strategy when it comes to teaching science is to use the practical experiments and the 5Es which help in simplifying explaining and passing on the information. In order for students to fully comprehend and understand scientific concepts, they should have a tangible experiment to help them. Teaching science depends on raising questions, discussion, visual communication through practical experiments, and observations.
Strategies:
As I plan to use the 5Es, first I start by the engagement. I introduce the idea of the lesson and allow the students to brainstorm what they will anticipate to learn. By this way, I create an atmosphere which engages them with me. Then we move to the exploration part of the 5Es model. I tackle the students prior knowledge by the starting activity which refreshes their minds, and makes them ready to accept new information and connect them with whatever they already know in the past. After this point,
the new concepts would be explained and introduced to the students. There are two different approaches which I like to follow, depending on the materials. I either explain explicitly the new ideas or I conduct activities from which the students implicitly extract the knowledge. After that, I „elaborate‟ more to enforce the new concepts by the implementation of practical experiments.
The students can be engaged with me and with eachother and this stage could be considered as the time of the class dedicated to enhance students‟ understanding. Finally, I have to assess that my students understood and I evaluate their comprehension by a number of ways. I ask them leading questions at the end of the lesson, I allow for interactive discussion, and usually if there is a practical experiment I let them write a small descriptive report. To further assure their understanding, I sometimes give them -home worksheets or conduct quizzes.
- Documented Evidence
- Questioning „Bloom‟s taxonomy‟
- Reflective journal
Aim:
Implementing and Managing Learning
target/focus:
To employ the 5Es model in teaching science lessons.