Saturday, March 20, 2010

Kindergarten students look closely at different materials

For our How the World Works unit of inquiry, Kindergarten students have been finding out about different types of materials. We started this unit using the proscopes attached to a laptop to investigate what these materials look like when magnified 50 times. The proscopes have cameras built into them so the students were each able to take several photos of the materials they found interesting.

After this we went on a walk around the school to see if we could discover where these materials were being used. This time we took the digital cameras with us and each student was responsible for finding a particular material and taking a photograph of it.
For our final week we are going to have the students use VoiceThread to talk about the materials. We're hoping they can tell us something about the properties of the materials (whether they are hard, soft, rough, smooth, transparent, opaque and so on) as well as how and why the materials have been used around the school.

Photo Credit: The photograph of the shell taken using a proscope and the photograph of the metal and glass front door of our school were both taken by our Kindergarten students.

2 comments:

  1. Great idea to have the kids use VoiceThread at the end of the unit to talk about the materials they encountered. I love that the kids are able to see the materials magnified, magnification of materials is usually saved for 5th grade here, I am sure the kindergartners are absolutely in a state of wonder at getting to see everything in a new way.

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  2. THIS is what learning looks like. Absolutely inspiring, Maggie! You are giving us something to aim for... :)

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