Sunday, February 13, 2011

Structured Inquiry: Adaptation

For my lesson I had students conduct a lesson on adaptation using different bird beaks.  Unfortunately, due to the scheduling of the class, we were unable to complete everything that we wanted during the lesson.  Attached is student work.  I started as whole class but this was the first science experiment we have done in class so they were very excited and we lost time during the instructions.  I ended up choosing a small group at the end of the day to finish the activity.  Students had to compete for food sources using different beaks (tweezers, straw, spoon and chopsticks).  They predicted how effective their beaks would be and then they recorded how much of each food they collected in their stomachs.  After we discussed if their prediction was correct and the second question.  Unfortunately we did not finish the rest of the questions but given the time, I think the students could have shown their understanding more clearly.

For the most part, the students understood that the spoon was the most effective beak.  The students used their data to answer the second question which we discussed as a class as well.  The students who had the straw were very frustrated but learned more about the activity because their bird could only have one food source and very little of it.

These two were Lilly's work:
https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&ik=138df54727&view=att&th=12e200874b2beb0b&attid=0.3&disp=inline&realattid=f_gk47y0ut2&zw
https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&ik=138df54727&view=att&th=12e200874b2beb0b&attid=0.4&disp=inline&realattid=f_gk47y82o3&zw

These two were Alan's work:
https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&ik=138df54727&view=att&th=12e200874b2beb0b&attid=0.1&disp=inline&realattid=f_gk47xtfe0&zw
https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&ik=138df54727&view=att&th=12e200874b2beb0b&attid=0.2&disp=inline&realattid=f_gk47xwx01&zw

1 comment:

  1. Did your students find that certain utensils worked better for different size food? Would you change and try and do this on two days instead of one? This is a neat activity. I have had my students complete it in the past, but I only had a couple of foods because of time.

    ReplyDelete