Exploring Our Fluid Earth

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This activity is an excellent way to engage students in learning the form and function of the external anatomy fish. My students remained engaged throughout the activity. Our biggest challenge was time. A 70 minute class was too short for this activity.

The questions provided work well. The discussions around a few of them were probably what the students will remember most about the lesson. When I do this one again, I'll substitute a few of my own that deal with things the students have been talking about in class.

I like Bryan's idea of running a lesson like this more than once each year. This would work well to check there understanding of the terms.

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Doing this after the microevolution lesson. Fingers crossed it goes better than the phases lesson

I modified the focus somewhat to help the students define evolution and its causes and to examine and develop their understanding of it.

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This is a good lesson to help clarify some of the scientific language we use in the classroom. I did this with my students 3rd quarter, but I would definately recommend doing it more towards the beginning of the year. My students were very engaged. I had them work in groups of 3 to brainstorm their own definitions of hypothesis, opinion and theory and chart it with markers on chart paper. That made it more fun for them and they enjoyed analyzing each example.

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Modes are a great way to get kids to think from a different point of View. Thinking like a scientist.

I liked this lesson and would do it at the beginning of a year and mid way through as a refresher and to revisit the idea of beliefs (opinion) and theory as we get into evolution topics.

I've always been a bit leery of teaching evolution in class. I'm not a bio teacher, so I've always thanked my lucky stars that I teach 8th grade science and focus on earth and space. So, when I taught this lesson, I was REALLY anxious about how it would go over. I didn't have to worry at all! The kids loved the activity and really got the point of how microevolution, and evolution in general, works. It was very straight forward and the dice make it seem like a game. Such a great activity! Will definitely do again next year.