Addy- Science Methods 1

  What did you learn this week? This week in the lab, we dove into ecology. We began by defining ecology. Ecology is the study of relationships between living organisms. After we discussed what ecology is we talked about ecosystems, habitats, and biomes. Ecosystems are a community of living and nonliving things that interact with each other in a specific environment. A habitat is a specific place where a particular community of organisms lives. Biomes are large areas that have similar climate conditions and similar dominant types of plants and animals. After we did that, we discussed food chains. A food chain describes who eats whom. After we talked about how food chains work and operate, we each picked a different terrain and created a food chain for that area. For example, my group chose to focus on freshwater and we created a food chain for that and then were given a disaster scenario and had to write down what would happen in the freshwater due to that disaster. Are you able to...

  What did you learn this week? This week we began by talking about the NGSS unit development assignment. Then we transitioned to sharing our reading reflections from the week prior. After that, we worked our way into learning about lesson segments. Lesson segments can differ based on their order of them. We learned that a teacher can use experience and intuition to plan the order of instruction. After we talked about lesson segments we began to talk about the 5E's. These are engage, explore, explain, extend, and evaluate. Engage is students' interest to learn is piqued. Explore is when students ask questions to understand and interact with hands-on activities. Explain is putting your theories to the test and it is more collaboratively. Extending is problem-solving and drawing conclusions. Evaluation is rethinking what you have learned and proving learning through writing, conversation, and demonstration. Are you able to relate what you learned to what you already knew? I hones...

     This week, we learned about seed germination. We learned how the life of a plant begins as a seed. We also learned a lot about the different parts of a seed and how seed germination really works. We went through all of the different stages of germination in full and great detail. After we discussed how seed germination works, we began to talk about viruses. We talked about whether viruses were living or nonliving and how we can determine this. Prof. said how she believed viruses were non-living and we talked about the stages of viruses as well.     I feel like I was able to relate some of this to what I had previously known. I feel like I remember learning about seed germination when I was in elementary or maybe even middle school. That was so long ago that I feel like I did not remember half of it. I also feel like I did not know how seed germination worked in depth as we talked about in class. I do not feel like I knew all of the stages of how it really w...

 This week in the lab, we originally discussed the NGSS. The NGSS (Next Generation Science Standards) are standards that were solidified in 2013. It helps students begin to think more critically about science versus getting an answer that is immediately wrong or right. Later in the lab we then talked about cells and the different characteristics of living things. We talked about the eight main characteristics of living things. These include Cellular composition, genetics and heredity, maintaining homeostasis, growth and change, movement, response to stimuli, metabolism, and reproduction. After discussing these eight things we then made a colorful chart with images to help show our learning. I was able to relate most of these things to what I already knew. I knew about characteristics of living things but I do not believe I would have been able to list all eight characteristics of them. Other than that, this lab was a good refresher on things that I will need to know for this class....