Closing of Fieldwork

Last Day With Mrs. Foster-Faith

Fieldwork at Bishop Dunn Memorial School has officially come to a close. For the final day of fieldwork, my peers and I headed over to Mrs. Foster-Faith's classroom to hear her closing commentaries on our time in her classroom. While in her classroom, Mrs. F made us some ice cream using liquid nitrogen which was one of the coolest things I have seen. 

The gas from the liquid nitrogen was going all over the floor and the cream was bubbling over onto the floor as well. Though it was quite the messy way to make ice cream, it came out more tasty than I expected. After the concluding of making the ice cream, we then had a mini Science Fair with the science fair projects of our class. I thought that this was a good idea as it allowed for me to see the different topics that my peers chose to test out. Also, we were responsible for grading their science projects as well. I thought that this was helpful as it allowed for us to now be on the other die. First, we were the students, creating the science fair projects along with the students of Bishop Dunn Memorial School but now we were the teachers, grading the projects based on a set list of criteria. This was an overall great way to emphasize the importance of the Science Fair by not only having us practice being a part of it but by also having us grade it as well. 

Trade Book Project

For my Trade Book Project I chose a book that went along with my Unit Plan about rocks. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book as I thought it was very informational about rocks. The book went above and beyond simply having information about rocks but it had illustrations with labels of several different kinds. 

The book also went into depth about rocks in everyday life which is important for students to learn in order for them to realize that science goes beyond the classroom. The book brought in historical information about rocks as well, including the fact that ancient peoples used to carve their language onto rocks in the form of petroglyphs. It also went on to include pictures of some of the oldest rocks in the world (some 1 billion years old!) One of my favorite parts of the book is where it mentions different monuments made out of rock that we may not think about, such as Mount Rushmore or Stonehenge, or Michelangelo's "David." Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this book and think it will be a great asset to any lesson on rocks.

In order to include a book trailer for this project I made an Animoto where I highlighted many important features that the book has in order to draw the reader in to checking the book out. I had a lot of fun using Animoto in order to make this trailer. If only it was completely free. 

Tagul

In order to view the Tagul my classmates and I made, you can click on the the picture above. Before using Tagul I had only used Wordle to make word clouds. I found the website of Tagul to be much more fun and interactive. It allowed the creator to make the words into any shape, and so we chose a space ship since the words in the word cloud are related to space. Tagul also allows for the words to get bigger and spin when the cursor is dragged over them. 

In this particular word cloud my peers and I were supposed to choose common words that came up in our research articles about Astronomy. Some of the words we found were reoccurring were NASA, Earth, Galaxy, and Scientist. We decided to put Planet 9 front and center of the word cloud since more than one person found an article on this topic and we all found it very intriguing.  

Overall, I believe Tagul is a great resource not only for teachers to use but students as well. Teachers can use Tagul to introduce the vocabulary of a lesson in an engaging way. Students can also be assigned to create their own Tagul based on vocabulary they acquired at the end of a unit, or words that they too found in various research articles. All in all it is a very helpful tool to use in the classroom!