Week 6- Flowers and Food Chains

 Learning This Week:

This week we learned about the different parts of the flower along with the pollination process, we also continued our discussion of food chains and impacts the environmental factors can have on ecosystems. We began by looking at our updated fast plant and ours finally has budded yellow flowers! It has been interesting how quickly our plant has developed over the course of six weeks. With that, we discovered the female and male parts of the flower and their importance of reproduction. We took dried bee's and modeled the pollination process that occurs in the natural world. Then, we looked at how food chains and food webs can be affected by natural and human caused events. We listened to the story Turtle, Turtle, Watch Out! by April Pulley Sayre, that describes the different environmental and human factors that could affect a turtles life cycle. After reading the story, we engaged in an interactive activity where we were given a fortune catcher and randomly were told a number and a letter. Based on our fate of the fortune teller, we (as a turtle) either survived or did not survive. We charted the survival rate of the turtles over 5 or 6 trials which incorporated the use of math skills. At the end we completed a worksheet where we laid out the positive and negative human/natural events that took place in the turtles life. 

Update on Fast Plant 

Application to Future Teaching: 

This week, our reader response was about the benefits that rubrics have on education. Teachers can differentiate their instruction and assessment practices through the use of analytical rubrics. A rubric should be designed with four levels of achievement and lay out the performance expectations that students should meet of each part of the lesson. This is useful for students to explicitly see what they need to achieve for a certain level of success. I will apply this to my future teaching by creating analytical rubrics for the Science and Engineering Practices that I teach my students. I will keep in mind the different levels of support that I will have for students with disabilities or multilingual students. As a student myself, I find rubrics to be a highly effective tool to see what I need to specifically do to get my anticipated grade on an assignment. As a teacher, I will put the same effort into creating my rubrics so my students can monitor their success as well. 

Turtle, Turtle Watch Out! Fortune Catcher

Questions for Further Study

1.) How does the teacher help students who need scaffolded support achieve higher levels (proficient or advanced) and eventually eliminate the use of scaffolds. 

2.) Are positive human interactions with ecosystems harmful for natural selection?

Turtle T-Chart