One of my favorite units in science is our rocks and soil unit. I guess it's because the kids already love rocks and dirt and so they are naturally interested in this unit.
Part of our unit includes science centers where the students go from one rock / soil station to another. Centers, stations, Daily 5, math workshop - these all come naturally in ELA and math but I don't always use them in science. But the rocks and soil unit lends itself naturally to this type of setup. Using one of my favorite black-holes of time (Pinterest) I found an awesome kindergarten unit on rocks and soil. She is obviously an awesome teacher so I've linked her unit below. I used one of her pages off of her rocks and soil unit and made it fit what I wanted. This is just a quick reminder that you can use something from other grade levels and adjust it to your grade...good teaching is good teaching.
After using the 'My Rock Report' I made a page of my own and just tweaked it a bit. Below is the link for my new version. Feel free to grab it and edit it so it works better for you.
So here were the centers:
- Rocks / Soil books
- I can never read all the books I have on a topic so the kids love getting to see new books or flip through ones we have read together as a class
- Soil Samples
- Each student had to visit each of the 3 soil samples and illustrate / label each of the samples in his learning journal
- Mystery Rock
- There were 2 of these stations. Each had a very specific sort of rocks - I made sure that no two rocks were too much alike. There might be 2 large white-ish rocks, but one was smooth and the other very porous. The students chose a 'mystery rock' and filled out the rock report without telling anyone their choice.
- We then took time at the end of each lesson to go through the reports and see if we could figure out the 'mystery rock' based on the rock report. After the class had guessed I had the student glue her mystery rock report into her journal. The LOVED this activity.
- Soil Size Sort
- This center was with me because it is so messy. I have 3 different size sifters (from a FOSS kit - Pebbles, Sand, and Silt) and the students use them to sort the rocks into different sizes. As we are doing this we discuss why we would need the different sizes sorted and what people might do with each size.
This doesn't sound like a lot of centers but, trust me, it is a lot of setup and you have multiples of the soil samples and mystery rock center. My students and I loved this science center setup - it was something different for a couple of days. Hopefully this will give you some ideas on how you might use centers in science. I know I'm going to keep looking for ways to incorporate this into other units.
No comments:
Post a Comment