Amanda FeltsWeblog

Content Area Materials Overview Worksheet 

Amanda Felts 

Name of Site: SAS In Schools 

Link to Resources:  http://www.sasinschool.com/

Author: Unknown

Identify the population of the students (grade, course):

I looked at this site for 7^th grade science and found things for the following:

·       Diseases’

·       Genetics

·       Weather

Give a brief description of how the materials would be used:

The materials found on the website for Diseases’ and Genetics was a web quest.  They had an interactive site that allowed for the students to look at different things.  The genetics part was pretty cool because student could mate things and figure out what the chances were for the animal to have certain traits.  They students could also see how viruses and diseases spread.  I was disappointed though about weather, I could not find anything on the site for weather. 

Identify other material that you could use with this material to augment instruction, especially for EC students:

This site would allow me to pair EC students with a regular students so that they could understand these concepts better.  The EC students would be able to see how something works and be able to understand the concepts the way their classmates do. 

Explain why you would use this material with your students. How will the material help your students learn the topic?

I would make this a class work assignment and have the students take the roll of a scientist in trying to figure out how much of the population would be affected by a spreading disease.  I would also let them play the role of a scientist in figuring out how to make plants or animals produce more adapted offspring. 

This material would help the students learn the material by them practicing how to apply their problem solving skills and use what we have done in class to solve a problem.  This activity would allow the students to realize that what they have learned is used every day by some people and their decisions affect their lives. 

When I looked at the NCSCOS for Seventh Grade Science, I thought there would be more on it.  I thought that the Competency Goals were too wordy for me, personally I like for people to just get to the point, instead of making it sound so confusing.  In the seventh grade students are supposed to understand the following: Rules of Scientific inquiry and lab safety, advantages of technology, Earths atmosphere, understanding of the human body and how it works together, heredity and genetics, and build an understanding objects and their force and motion. 

The coolest thing that I found on DPI’s website was the NCSCOS Science Resource Pagethis page was just designed for middle school science teachers, It has worksheets, lab ideas, gave you websites for worksheets a simpler way to put it is North Carolina’s textbook on-line for teachers.  I like how these documents were very much to the point on what these students should know and ways to teach it.