Blog Post Week 4

In week 4 of the lab, one of the biggest things we went over was talking about the 5e models of science instruction. I learned a couple of big things about it. It represents a series of instructional steps designed to teach science topics and it also focuses in on testing ideas and drawing conclusions through reading, writing, and discussions. The specific 5 e's of the model of instruction I learned are Engage, Explore, Explain, Extend, and Evaluate. I learned that engage means Students' capability of engaging with prior knowledge to take that toward current activities to connect ideas in learning using interest and curiosities. Exploring represents students engaging with hands-on activities to investigate different content to then ask questions on those to develop different hypotheses for investigation. The Explain part was just putting theories to the test to then collaborate on those. Extending is just having students involved in more of the challenging problems that provide real-life examples to apply their understanding of given concepts. We also looking into what all the roles of all those E's of the model are for teacher vs student roles.

Before today, I knew how most teachers set up lessons and what important factors are in lesson building. Today, hearing the 5E model of instruction opened me up to applying these new terminologies to the specific bases on how teachers make sure that it flows well. This opened another viewpoint to me and just how important it is to consider how you are planning things and that the steps are flowing in a good way that leads to strong conclusions. Previously I knew some information on this, but looking into the model in a variety of different forms allowed me to more deeply think about it all and genuinely understand it uniquely and differently than before. More knowledge and education on things lead to being able to get your point across to all peers and be able to see things highly to allow others to get more out of education experience.

This lesson taught me and showed me firsthand just how well modeling activities work for all involved. It feels a lot more hands-on, and easier to understand because we as students must consider the material more so. This has shown me the power of creating alternate activities to drill in main knowledge ideas to reach the main points. As a future educator, I recognized what practices work well just by going through different modeling activities firsthand and seeing what the power does. After seeing real-life caterpillars forming through stages, specifically here I witnessed a caterpillar getting formed in the process of reaching the chrysalis stage. After seeing it happen firsthand, I feel like I already have a deeper understanding for. I recognize this as a future educator and plan to implement and provide visual resources for students as well! I took a lot out of this lab class that I can take with me in the future.

modeling activity table teacher vs student roles.

below shows a caterpillar stage occurring real life time. We witnessed caterpillars crawling to top to prepare for pupa stage (form into chrysalis)