May+4,+2011

Group 2 Experiment day Wednesday May 4, 2011 Today we were working with group two while they completed their experiments. This group had ten students in it with five different experiments. We were disappointed to be missing one of the students today. All of the experiments were very simple and needed little assistance. It was fun to see the students enjoying completing different experiments will little to no support of us. To start the day, we reviewed the scientific method and had the students write it down again. This was a nice review for the students because it has been almost three weeks since we had seen them and talked about the scientific method with time. After the review, we turned our review into a check list. We asked the students what is they already had done and what they needed to finish before they could do the experiment. The students had everything does expect the procedure. So, the students wrote out their procedure and then began their experiment While the experiments were going on, Amy was on in the hallways with one group so that there was supervision out there and Brianna was inside the classroom with the other four groups. The experiment that was in the hallway involved balloons, so Amy blew up the balloons to save time. Brianna heated water and provided other ideas when the experiments were not successful. She never said do this but asked questions to have the students thinking about other possible solutions. When we asked students questions about other solutions, we were emphasizing the point we made during one of our first lessons about the scientific method not always working and having to retry experiments. The students had a lot of fun completing their own experiments and got a better understand of how specific directions should be. Our original plan was to have two hours for the students to complete the procedure write up and the experiment. Due to other circumstances, this group could not have two hours and instead, we needed to rush the students a little so that they could finish the experiment in an hour. This caused a little frustration on our part because we felt bad pushing the students forward instead of just letting them explore the experiment themselves. At the same time, it was beneficial because it kept the students on task and there was less messing around in comparison to the first group.