What do you think about Jennifer’s initial outline for the project? Please comment below with your thoughts by Tuesday 1st May
Read it here: Enquiry Zone project draft outline -How much do you know about your own body?
Note: This is not the finished plan, rather Jennifer would like to know what you think about the idea and how it could be made to work in your class. Here are some potential questions you, and your students, might want to think about:
- Is it clear what sort of things the students will be doing?
- Could you run this with your students as the investigators and other classes as the subjects?
- How would you fit the activities into 3 lessons?
- What is missing so far that you need to know?
- What initial ideas do students have for anatomy teaching activities?
- Where could students be making decisions about what to do?
- Are the students doing enough of the science?
- Are there any terms or concepts you’re not familiar with?
- What materials do you feel would be helpful to help you run the project?
Hi! I think it sounds really interesting, and look forward to taking part. As Year 6, we have already done the major organs in the body this year, so it will be interesting to see what information they have retained! I’d be keen to see which type of learning helps the children to retain more information, as it might inform some of our future planning, and I know the children will enjoy looking at the results in the Aim 3 part of the lesson.
I think it would work over a couple of / three afternoons, which we have the liberty to do after SATS! Our Maths lead will be delighted at the Numeracy links – we’ve discussed the possibility of doing the project whole school (with perhaps some adjustments in Year 3 and 4: just Aim 1, for example, as they may find the reading to be a bit of a struggle, and presumably, differentiating the Literacy level of Aim 2 would prevent a fair test?).
As much help with Aim 2 as possible would be useful – emailed copies of all the resources, or links to websites, for example. I don’t think we’d be able to produce some of them ourselves in the time frame, and they may not be quite what you want!
The one question I do have is how much time should elapse between Aim 2 and the re-testing of the anatomy knowledge? Would it be straight after? The next day, or even longer?
Hope that’s all clear!
Thank you,
Jen
Hi Jen
Thanks for your comments – I’m glad you think it sounds interesting and achievable! I’m very happy to provide some ideas/resources for Aim 2 if you think they’d be helpful. It would probably work better ‘scientifically’ if all schools taking part used the same resources and I think I’d be able to do this but I’m also aware that sometimes the act of making something is the learning process, rather than just being provided with something, so I’m happy to take advice from you all on this and go with the majority.
Excellent that you’ve had interest from the whole school! Different levels could pose a problem, yes, but definitely as many people to participate in Aim 1 would be amazing as I’m very keen to learn what different ages know about the body.
Great question about the length of time before retesting! If there is time, it would be great to do a post test the next day perhaps and then another a week later – this could test the overall retention of knowledge and not just a quick recall of something done recently. I didn’t put this on the initial plan but your comment got me thinking and that would be an added investigation.
I hope that helps and let me know if there are more questions.
Best wishes
Jennifer
Sounds good and doable, I think its great to get the students thinking about whats the best way to learn something.
I think each stage would definitely need a clear and simple, self contained resource that would be easy to use.
e.g.
Stage 1 – Knowledge Scorecard
Stage 2 – Clear outlines of 3 activities
Stage 3 – Same as stage 1 + a bit to record before and after.
Mark
Hi Mark
Thanks – very pleased to hear you think it could work. Yes, very happy to provide simple resources to help make it as easy to run as possible. I think the idea is that I write lesson plans and provide resources (or provide help and advice) for each part.
Cheers
Jennifer
p.s.
It might be possible and quite easy to set up and share a google spreadsheet that all school teachers could edit so we can look at the patterns.
Also will the student decide what activity they will do for stage 2? or will they be randomly allocated?
Great idea! It would be lovely to share all the data across all participants.
A random allocation might be best so that there are approximately even numbers between groups – what do you think? Would it be easy to convince one group to do one activity over an other if they had to choose independently?
Jennifer