Week 3 Blog

 1. What did you learn this week?

    This week in lab we mainly learned about life cycles of animals and plants. To apply this learning, we first created life cycle models of animals or plants of our choice. To do this we used a paper plate to separate each stage in the life cycle, and play-doh to model the different stages. My group chose to do the life cycle of a turtle, which starts as eggs, turns into a hatchling, becomes a juvenile, and finally ends up as a full grown adult turtle. 

2. Are you able to relate what you learned to what you already knew?

    Yes, I was able to relate what I learned to what I already knew by taking my knowledge of life cycles and doing an activity to represent that. Going over life cycles was a good refresher since I have not really learned specifics of it since elementary or middle school. It was also nice to practice what we might do as teachers in our future classrooms. It was also interesting to compare and contrast animal life cycles to plant life cycles. 

4. How can you apply what you've learned to your teaching in the future?

    I can apply what I've learned to my teaching in the future by implementing models into my classroom during science and other subjects. Models are very useful for most activities, but they are especially helpful for the topic of life cycles. I definitely plan on using models in my future classroom and play-doh is a really easy thing to do that with! For planting the seeds, this is an awesome model to use in the classroom because students will get to see the life cycle in real time which may help them comprehend it better.