ND Curriculum Initiative

Subject & Standards

Understandings & Goals

Enduring Understanding: I want my students to be problem solvers. I want them to feel confident in their abilities to use their knowledge and apply their skills to solve problems. They are very good at obtaining knowledge, but I want them to be able to use and to apply that knowledge. Goal(s): That my students will be able to use the processes of observing, questioning, hypothesizing and reflecting to investigate the world around them. That my students will be able to record their investigations and share their results with others.

Questions Answered

Essential questions: 1. What do we know about snow? 2. What causes snow to melt? 3. How can we manipulate the snow to slow the melting process. 4. How can we show others about what we have learned and concluded. Objectives: I will guide the students to make observations of what they know about the properties of snow. I will guide the students to question why snow melts? I will guide the students to hypothesize about what they could do to slow the melting process. I will guide the students as they investigate ways to alter the melting process. I will guide the students as they reflect on their observations and plan how they might best present their results to share with others.

Assessment

What quiz and test items (e.g. simple content-focused questions that require a single, best answer) will provide evidence of understanding? I will orally question and ask for explanation from the students throughout the investigation and data gathering processes so that they may demonstrate their understanding of the processes as we complete them. More formal assessment would be impractical, if not impossible, for the kindergartners. Their writing skills at this point are minimal. What academic prompts (e.g. open-ended questions or problems that require students to think critically and then to prepare a response / product / performance) will provide evidence of understanding? Oral questions, group discussion and brainstorming, and group participation in the investigations that take place will all enhance the students’ understanding of this unit of instruction. What performance tasks and projects (e.g. complex challenges that are authentic, mirror the real world and require a performance or product) will you include that will provide evidence of student understanding? Student participation and student/teacher communication will provide evidence of student understanding. The students have done a graphing unit in their mathematics studies and they should be able to use this knowledge to show the data from their investigations. What other evidence (e.g. observations, work samples, dialogues, student self-assessment) of understanding will you collect? Our collaboration with others and the kindergartners ability to explain their collected data to others will show evidence of their understanding of our project.

Instructional Strategies

This project actually has components of all three learning strategies involved. The students will be doing inquiry-based learning as they discuss what they know about snow and the melting process. They will shift to problem based learning when they are confronted with the problem of how to slow the melting process. They will then move to a project-based strategy as they decide how to best show others the data that they have collected. I want the students to move to the higher level thinking that will be required of them to come up with viable solutions to their “problem”. I want to be able to be the guide, and the motivator, and the person who promotes the group interaction and provides the positive feedback that is so important to the students at this age.