This lesson took two days as students rotated through 4 stations answering the question What is Life? and learning about the need and characteristics of living things.
1. One station included the students watching a screen cast video that I made of the "What is life?" power point. While watching the video the students followed along and filled in a set of close notes. You can find this resource here or here.
2. Another station was a foldable that was a mnemonic device to remember the characteristics of life. This resource can be found here.
3. Task Cards were at the third station. Here there were a set of cards and the students needed to identify them as living or non-living. This resource can be found here.
4. A worksheet was the fourth station. At this station the students needed to identify each object as living or non-living and use evidence and information from their notes to explain their answer. This resource can be found here.
There wasn't a specific order that I had the students work in, but I did say that I wanted the worksheet to be the last station. I felt that the students needed to have completed the notes in order to best answer the questions there.
At the end of the second period we reviewed the answers from the worksheets as well as had a discussion about the information in the notes.
I think this sounds really good. I hope you are happy with your experiment.
ReplyDeleteI found that my station work became more meaningful to the students when them got to produce something. For example, you could have a station where they create a story/song/poem that teaches the Characteristics of Life to someone else.
Thanks for the suggestion...I will work that into future station lessons
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