Brynna

Simpson
February 20, 2015
SCE 4310-901

Lesson Analysis and Adaption

For this activity, I chose a lesson that includes a long term
investigation about plant cycles and the structure of a plant. This lesson is
considered a Engineering Design Challenge that results in a cumulating
project that has students designing mazes to demonstrate the plants
response to light. (The lesson is included at the end of this paper)

This lesson includes science content about the life cycle of plants and
the structure of plants. The entire lesson revolves the students knowledge of
a plants life cycle and how different variables (light, water, ect) effect a plants
growth, while also incorporating the students prior knowledge of the
structure of plants and knowing what each part does. There were a few
terms included in what the teacher should be teaching the students, such as:
gravitropism, thigmotropism, and photopropism, that the teacher will
definitely have to spend time explaining those and making sure that the
students know the information to help them succeed with this investigation.

The main skills that this activity uses are: observation, investigating,
designing, comparing, and testing. Over the course of this long term
investigation the students study the parts of the plant and observe how it
grows, then they each design their own experiments to see how the plants
respond to varying levels of light and then compare their results with their
peers and discuss what happened.

After reading through this lesson a few times, I realized that the
author assumes that the students already know a lot of information about
plants and how theyre structured and their life cycle. On the third page of
the lesson it says: Although life cycles are not addressed in third grade
standards, which is assuming that the students already know everything
about the life cycles of plants so that they could correctly complete this
project. There are a lot of places through out the lesson where teacher would
have to ensure that the students do have the appropriate prior knowledge to
be able to continue with the lesson, as the information that they are assuming
the students already know is critical to the students understanding the
purpose and goal of this project and also succeeding with it and getting as
much out of it as they can.

Lesson Plan: