reflections

REFLECTIONS

1. I was amazed that many of the children didn't class silkworms as animals. This led us off on a tangent investigating the classification of animals.

2. Live animals are always rather unpredictable. It would be nice if they obeyed the time frame of a school term but of course they don't. They began hatching ¾ of the way through Term 3 and much of the largest stage of the caterpillars and some spinning was during the holidays. Fortunately quite a few late starters did manage to spin their cocoons for the class into the first weeks of Term 4.

3. Questioning was an area that required some explicit teaching. The basic fat, skinny questions were revisited as well as more open-ended questions.

4. Another activity that the children participated in was measuring and graphing the growth of the silkworms. This was then visually recorded using graphs in Excel.

5. The children required quite a bit of help planning investigations/ experiments that were scientifically correct in their procedure using a control.

6. My next unit of work will be on fibres. I intend letting the children investigate the properties of cotton, wool and silk. We will use the silk collected from the silkworms. Hopefully they can discover why each of these fibres are used in the way they are.