Science Lesson Planning

All the excitement around me about science teaching is getting to me. I am as excited as all of you in being part of this experience. The preparation, the lesson plans, and the blogs about how you are preparing to teach science, all seems to fall in place. This preparation and planning is important because then you will still maintain your balance in case your plans do not follow the path of your design.

So my question now is, Are you prepared (mentally..) to be flexible if the your plans do not work out the way it should have?

Think Quest Science Resource

Here is a website that gives interesting lesson plans for science and other subjects too.

Think Quest

Incredible Number of Puppies

Yesterday, Tikki, an amazing Jack Russell gave birth to NINE puppies, probably a record number. Tikki, by the way belongs to my daughter's horse riding instructor, Geralyn. The puppies are healthy and fine.

Just three weeks ago, during Tikki's regular vet visit, her vet became concerned when she could not feel the puppies. Immediately, the vet, without a thought cut open Tikki to check for her puppies. Well! they were there and the puppies luckly ended up fine even after being exposed to the outside environment during that time.

It makes me wonder, if we have become so dependent on instruments that we stop trusting our own knowledge, intuition based on our experience to decipher some of the questions that we come across. For example, in the medical field when a nurse checks for blood pressure, should he/she have internalized to analyze the numbers that the machine throws out to see if they make sense or not. Also as we depend on a machine to tell us the measurements, do we loose the knowledge on alternative ways to check blood pressure that is not totally dependent on a machine.

My Science Story

This summer I watched sparrow parents take care of their babies. They were working so hard feeding their babies, cleaning the nest, and guiding them on their first flight. In the past ten years since I moved to US, I have had more time and opportunity to build my connections with nature and with science than I have had before. I have immensely enjoyed camping in Rangeley lake and Smokey mountains, visiting Yellowstone and Grand Canyon, or just biking the rail trails. As a high school student, I remember feeling excited about going to Physics, Chemistry, or Biology lab. It was facinating to dissect earthworm, frog and some species of flowers to study what is inside them that is so similar to us. But my real passion for science came with my first year teaching physical science to 6th graders and life science to 7th graders. Teaching them simple machines, work concepts with use of examples from everyday life, and to admire the detail structures of plants and animals using a microscope was fascinating. The various sciences became much more alive when I started teaching them. Athough I am trained in math, I find teaching science more interesting than math as it is so much more easier to connect it with our life and with the world around us.

I look forward to learning more about science with you all.