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Understanding Energy, Deepika Menon, Blake Shelby, And Christine Mattingly

Decent Essays
In the article Understanding Energy, Deepika Menon, Blake Shelby, and Christine Mattingly wrote about their lesson on understanding energy using the 5 E’s. As stated in the article, The Next Generation Science Standards have a standard for understanding the basics of energy as young as Kindergarten to 2nd grade (Menon et. al., 2016, p. 54). Energy is such an abstract concept that these teachers wanted to create a lesson that would get their students to understand and ask questions about energy. First Menon, Shelby, and Mattingly had their students play “Simon Says” to engage them. After playing for a little bit, they asked their students whether or not they could do this again or how their bodies felt (Menon, Shelby, and Mattingly, 2016,…show more content…
Students predicted before they did this part and then proceeded to think about what happened. Students found that the ball resting moved when the ball that rolled down the ramp hit it. Therefore, students talked about how some of the energy was transferred. Finally, students moved into the evaluation stage, where the teachers assessed students on what they learned about energy and any other concluding remarks students had. After reading this article on this lesson plan, I definitely think that this would be a great scientific investigation for kindergarten to second grade. This lesson broke down the basic components of energy in a way that younger students could begin to understand. I thought it was very engaging, how the teachers, Menon, Shelby, and Mattingly, started with students describing their understanding of energy and how some of the students understood that food gives us energy (Menon et. al., 2016, p. 55). It is very important for teachers to spark their students’ schema before moving into a new topic so that they can see what they know and want to know. The use of predicting on their data tables was also a great addition because it got students thinking about what they thought would happen during their investigation. It is teaching them what scientists do a lot of the time, which is doing experiments or investigations to prove their ideas. The teachers asked engaging questions like, “What do you notice about the distance the ball traveled at each
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