Week 7- Part One of Science Challenge

Content

As I was looking over the various science probes, I thought it would be a great way to incorporate technology a I teach my students about globes and maps and the community. I decided to focus on 2nd grade and utilize the 2nd grade science core standards 2 and 3. More specifically, I want to focus on these objectives:

Standard 2:
Objective 2: Examine important aspects of the community and culture that
strengthen relationships.
ii. Compare rural, suburban, and urban communities.
iii. Relate goods and services to resources within the community.

Standard 3:
Objective 4: Demonstrate how symbols and models are used to represent features of the
environment. i. Identify and use information on a map or globe (i.e., map key or
legend, compass rose, physical features, continents, oceans)
ii. Use an atlas and globe to locate information
iii. Locate continents and oceans on a map or globe (i.e., North America,
Antarctica, Australia, Africa, Pacific Ocean, Atlantic Ocean).


Pedagogy
Through this activity, my students will practice and demonstrate the following:
- Observation- observing different buildings and how communities function
- Inquiry- where things are located on a map; why communities are set up in the way they
are; construct questions about the world and their community; pose inquiry about
the world around them and how it functions; pose questions about the
community; create new questions from existing questions and answers
- Predicting- creating predictions where things are located on maps and globes; which
direction do they think items/areas are; creaing hypothesis and testing them out
- Analysis- taking information gather and making conclusions, new questions, etc


Technology
I plan to use Google Earth for this assignment. I plan to use the 3D building layer, Street layer, and basic navigation (zoom in and out, compass, directions, etc) to help facilitate the discussion of maps and our communities.

For Standard 3, I could introduce children to flay maps and globes, explaining how maps help us navigate and know more about the world around us. We could discuss places they have been in the world and locate them on the map. I would introduce the compass and how they are used. I could explain how with technology, we have even more maps! I would show them Google Earth and explain these are made by satellites, so they are real images. We could make inferences about where oceans are, where they think other places are, and become familiar with navigation. The children would be encouraged to observe places that look familiar and to make guesses of what they are looking at (i.e. I could bring up and ocean and have them guess what the large blue mass is)

For Standard 2 (community awareness), I think it would be appropriate to bring up Provo and examine the community we live. The children could announce some of the places they know in the community. After we have visited these places, we could make inferences of why certain places are put together (homes, businesses, etc). We could also look at big cities and small farm towns, etc. We could make guesses of what might we find in each place and why. This would allow us to discuss how various communities function.