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INTRODUCTION TO INVESTIGATION
The purpose of the investigation is to encourage students to become aware of and to beinquisitive about plants and animals in their environment. It is the responsibility of theteacher to create a learning environment conducive to scientific inquiry. Students need todevelop independent skills and be able to rely on personal critical thinking. It takes imagination for a primary teacher to develop an appropriate student centeredinvestigation lesson. Children at this stage of development have difficulty distinguishingplant and animal attributes. At the kindergarten grade level, students are taught howscientist use their five senses to make Scientific observation. This is aligned with LifeScience Standard number 2. As first grade students develop tools for investigating. They need to build uponobservation skills. The student develops different ways to record and present data. Theinvestigation strengthens their ability to make an hypothesis and draw conclusions. The second grade students can conduct careful investigations as a basis forunderstanding predictions based on patterns of observations rather than random guessing.They follow verbal instructions and learn to use vocabulary about scientificinvestigations to follow the formal scientific method of hypothesis, observations, method,outcomes, and conclusions. They put their data from the investigation into graphs andtables for presentation. These activities are aligned to the Life Science Standard 2 At the out come of our investigation the students will know how to observe anddescribe similarities and differences in the appearance of birds. The students will beable to communicate their observations orally, in drawings, in graphs, and in tables. |