Wow! Students were SO excited to begin our science unit about Magnets last week. This is one of the required science units in our district's curriculum, and it's always a popular one! The students' excitement is contagious! We began our study by making a chart with the heading, "What we THINK we know about magnets." I talked to students about how we will check and confirm or revise the ideas/thoughts that are on our chart. Some students do have misconceptions about magnets and magnetism, but I explained to everyone that we'll be like scientists and explore together through experiments, books, websites, and more. Like scientists, we'll see sometimes that our predictions/ideas were incorrect and we'll simply learn from it and get smarter as we go! We began on Thursday/Friday with three stations: a pre-assessment with me (so I can find out what students already know about things that are magnetic/non-magnetic), a magnet explore station (we have to play with the materials before we can be scientific with them!), and a short video about magnets on BrainPopJr.com.
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| The magnet explore station. |
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| Watching a BrainPop Jr. video. |
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| Pre-assessment=more focused teaching--I don't need to teach something everyone already knows! :-) This helps me see if I can go beyond the basics into higher level content. |
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| Making a discovery about compasses and magnets! |
Scott liked BrainPopJr so much that we signed up for an account. He enjoys watching the videos!
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