This experience in the classroom was way more positive for me and for the students than when I did the bubble experiment in second grade. I still did not feel like there was a real purpose for the experiment, but it had a more logical beginning, middle, and end. We opened the experiment by asking what would happen if we jumped off of a cliff. They responded with, "we would crack our heads and die." Then, we showed them a video of people parachuting off of a cliff, and we asked why they didn't crack their heads. They recognized that it was because of the parachute. We asked if they thought the parachute would speed up or slow down the fall. They originally said that it would speed up the fall, so we tested it. We dropped a plain clothespin and a clothespin with a parachute at the same time. The one without the parachute hit the ground much faster than the other one. They then changed their thoughts and said a parachute slows people down. They recognized that it was better to fall slowly so you don't get hurt.
I found that the most difficult part of the experiment was that the students were not very talkative. I'm not sure if some of them were ELL's, but whatever it was, they were very quiet. This made the inquiry part of this lesson very difficult. When we do this again, I might suggest that the teacher make groups to where there are students who are more likely to participate mixed in with the more quiet students. I would also give the students more of a chance to be involved with timing the experiment so that they could see how the timer works. I don't think we covered what the time meant with much detail.
I think that this experiment was way easier to conduct with students, and I think it gave them more of an opportunity to explore for themselves. I did find that less students had background knowledge on parachutes than they did on bubbles.
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I like how you used a real life video to introduce the concept of parachutes. My partner and I briefly talked about them, and luckily all our students knew what a parachute was. However, they were unfamiliar with the structure of parachutes and having a video or pictures would have alleviated this confusion. It was also great that your group tested the childrens' misconceptions of what the parachute does. This is exactly what we are trying to do, and it appears that your group really let the students guide the exploration.
ReplyDeleteI was surprised with how talkative our group was. I expected the lesson to mimic that bubble activity in which the students only answered our question. Because we had one student that was particularly loquacious other students were encouraged to speak to one another. This was aided by the low pressure activity, we communicated early on to our group that we were going to have fun and think like scientists.