1. What is your most pleasurable memory with regard to science while you were in elementary school? What did you learn as a result of these science lessons that have stayed with you until today? How much time do you think should be dedicated to the teaching of science in elementary school?
2. Now..........think about your experience with science classes in high school. What was your favorite science course? Why? Is it necessary for science to be incorporated into our K-12 curriculum and to make it a high school requirement? Why?
In elementary school, my class made a class garden. we planted seeds, watered them, and watched them grow. The garden was outside and was maintained through the years by the next classes. When I was in middle school we started composting and that was eventually used to help the elementary school's garden. A lot of time was dedicated to these science lessons and I feel as though it not only helped us with science but with other skills as well like teamwork.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite science class in high school was chemistry, it was the subject I excelled in at the time and I found it interesting. I liked to know how things were made and how they changed, along with the experiments we did as a class. Science is necessary because it is all around us. We need to know about the world we live in and that's what science does for students.
In elementary school, the most memorable experience to me was watching the life cycle of a butterfly in real time. My teacher got a few caterpillar eggs, and had an enclosure in our class that we got to observe the changes over time. With this being my only memorable experience of a science lesson, it made me realize that doing science lessons hands-on is a very important part of science instruction. If students aren't getting hands-on activities, the science lessons might go right over their heads. I think that there should be science experiments at least every week in an elementary classroom, because it gives students the freedom of being curious of the world around them, and work together to understand something.
ReplyDeleteMy high school science classes were extremely hard for me, where I focused more on getting a good grade than actually enjoying an experiment. If we focused more on hands-on learning and not solely on grades, it would help students stay curious and interested in science as a subject.