Strategy+7+-+Manipulatives+&+Models

Strategy 7 - Manipulatives, Experiments, Labs and Models

Carla: This is far and away my favorite strategy - there's nothing stronger for a kid than being able to build a personal connection to a topic by building a model or doing an experiment or creating some sort of physical representation to actually touch. I always think about this when teaching electricity - I can't even imagine teaching about circuits without actually MAKING one! I try to do some sort of physical, hands-on event with every unit I teach...bringing in objects that represent characters for reading or pulling images off the internet and making study cards for science, etc. I have a friend who was telling me the other day about the idea of creating a "memory object" (okay, she actually used some fancy intellectual word that MEANS that, but I can't remember the word...that friend will have to put it in here if she reads this one!) for every story the class reads - giving each of the students one of the objects to keep, and also posting one on a bulletin board in the room, and using them as memory prompts to go back and review stories. What a great way to be able to go back and compare characters and plot lines and problems, etc! One tool that I've fallen in love with lately is Gizmos - online experiments and labs, for those experiments that are too big or too time-consuming or too expensive to do in class. My class grew plants using Gizmos this year - we've shot projectiles out of cannons, created levers for large men, experimented with changing the populations of a forest, rotated the Earth on its axis to change the seasons, etc. The website is www.explorelearning.com