Melissa's Melting Pot

What went well? The children learnt the benefits of magnifying glasses to observe objects closely. For their age they produced detailed drawings of their shells observing the different patterns, textures, sections, colours noticed and contours. Children referred back to the object frequently by looking through the magnifying glass to check their drawing against their object. Children then progressed onto making models of their shells out of Plasticine they again focused on getting the correct shape and contours of their shell and began to draw in patterns using their pencils to carve in to create textures.  Why did it go well? Gave them lots of prompts throughout the activity to keep children motivated and using the magnifying glasses got them engaged in the activity more as excited by this new piece of equipment. What did not go as planned or work well? Lack of explanation as felt pushed for time when in fact if we had spent more time properly exp...

For Science we went into a school and taught a lesson on observation to small groups of children. We based our lesson on the one which we had had earlier in the year and wrote up a lesson plan (then annotated it afterward which are the bits in red) Here is the lesson plan which we used to teach this lesson: Here are some photos from the lesson... They used Plasticine to try and model the shells and explore observation of patterns The children drew out what they saw, what was quite interesting was that one child looked really closely and saw that the shell actually sparkled so drew that in by sketching little stars on the shell.

In science we covered learning to observe and did this through asking compare and contrast questions about our snails (Yes! We were given snails to play with...)  We came up with questions such as what shape is the shell? What patterns are there? What colours are in the shell? And then we looked really closely using magnifier glasses at the details of the snail and its shell.  We then had to draw our snail on a piece of A4 paper ensuring that we filled the page with our sketch, now give a class of art specialists a task which involves drawing in detail and you know that we will do exactly that and take our time with it! I don't think Steve (Lecturer) thought that one through!  Here is my drawing of my snail, he got named Bob...