Our new activity is now on the website 'What was it like to be there - in the rocky world?' Bring a rock into the classroom that has lots of clues about how and where it formed. Ask your pupils to 'feel' what it was like to be there when the rock was being formed, e.g. swimming through a coral reef, walking in a desert, watching lava flow from a volcano.Let us know how you get on.
1 comment:
In my opinion, this activity is really suitable for the students who think rocks and minerals are boring. In this process, students can use their imaginations, creativity, the experiences of the world today and the evidence preserved in the rocks to travel themselves to the past when the rocks formed. Students can learn the information related to solid rock just like watching an adventure movie. This activity not only increases student’s motivation to learn, but also helps teachers design the traditional“boring rock” curriculum more easier and interesting .
Although this activity seems really perfect for all the students (from ages 8-80！), I still want to bring up some suggestions to make it more suitable for class teaching in Taiwan. I suggest that students could preview some information about the rocks in the activity before the class starts. In this way, students will have appropriate prior knowledge about rocks, so that they can use this knowledge to picture themselves more easier when and where rocks formed. It also helps students answer those series of questions in a complete way.
Furthermore, teachers should summarize all the information about the formation of solid rock which students brought about in the class, by comparing the difference between the rocks. Students would be impressed by this systematic framework and then integrate the observation and the past experiences into some unified scientific concept.
It is really an interesting and meaningful activity to develop student’s scientific knowledge and the knowledge about nature of science. I just can’t wait sharing this teaching plan with all my classmates！
I am Pauline Lin, a graduate student from National Taiwan Normal University. My major is science education. Thank you！
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