Teaching science can be very rewarding. Through your lessons you instill in your students and curiosity toward life and nature. This desire to explore and discover is a key to unlocking some of life’s wonders.
You will find that teaching science is more rewarding when you are not simply completing worksheets and conducting prepackaged experiments. What you want to encourage is a two way of questions and answers, not a memorization of facts and formulas. As you are teaching science ask your students thought provoking questions that require them to explore the world around them. The questions can be simple, such as “What makes it rain?”
When you are teaching science try and incorporate as many “hands on” type activities. You can ask questions like “How can we calculate the weight of this book?” By doing this, you encourage the students to figure out their own formulas, and explore facts and concepts on their own. Giving students data that they need to collect on their own can also help them grasp certain concepts. For example, they can keep a rain log, or measure the growth of a plant. Teaching science in this way makes it much more retainable for the students.
Another great method for teaching science is to utilize a topic in the news that everyone is talking about, perhaps a problem, and build a project around it that is personal and that involves students looking at different aspects of the project and breaking it down into smaller tasks and questions. Students will then benefit from learning from the social interaction they get by collaborating with each other, in addition to coming up with creative ways to use science to solve the problem. An example project of this kind might be “How can we keep cars from speeding in school zones?” You will be amazed by the creativity of your students!
There are some excellent web resources you can use for teaching science as well. Students love the interactiveness of the web. You can conduct some great information searches as a class, and thoroughly cover a subject that the class shows interest in. Another great way to inspire your students to explore and ask questions is to study some of the lives and discoveries of the great scientists throughout history. This is an appropriate way to go about teaching science through example, as these great scientists asked great questions, explored the facts, and got great answers.
Photo Credit:woodleywonderworks
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