Parachutes at Hawriver

The second trip to Hawriver was much better then the first trip. I don’t know if it is because the students were older or if it was because of the different experiment that we were completing with the students but they seemed to grasp the concepts that we were trying to get across and they seemed much more intrigued by the lesson. The first time that we went, our students knew what a bubble was and how you made one, but they had never read or been introduced to a book about bubbles. When we began our lesson, we asked the students if they knew what a parachute was and they did not recognize the word right away. As we began describing what a parachute was, one of the students went “oh yeah we have a book on those!” and pointed to a book at the front of the room. Once they could make that connection, the lesson went much smoother and they were able to connect what we were telling them to something that they had been introduced to before hand.

Our students LOVED building their own parachutes and they definitely loved being able to stand on a chair and drop the parachute. The fact that they were making their own experiment pieces really got them more involved in the lesson. With the bubbles activity, everything was already made for the students and they were just participating in the step by step instructions of an experiment. With the parachutes, the students were able to tell us what they thought would work best and which ones would fall faster and slower and then they got to test their own ideas and to them, they were creating the lesson that they were participating in.

When it came to recording the data, we wanted to use an average of the three trials that were completed for each parachute. Here, we ran into a problem that we ran into with the bubbles experiment. We did not know these students and we did not know the different levels that they were on or what the students have been introduced to and what they had not been introduced to. The concept of an average was something that we thought third graders would have been introduced to but they had not heard that term in an academic setting. We then had to take some time to explain what an average was and in the end, we decided that it was too confusing for the students to use the average. We did not want the lesson to become about averages instead of parachutes. Another problem that we ran into was the concept of decimals/fractions. When we said that the parachute took 1 ½ seconds to fall, we asked them how to write that in decimal form and they did not know that ½ was equivalent to 0.5. They also could not determine which was more – ½ or ¼ and then they also struggled with whether 0.5 or 0.25 was more or less so we had to help them out with that.

Even though there were a few areas that needed to be worked on (averages and recording the data) I really think that the students understood our lesson and took away the concepts and the right meanings from the lesson that we were trying to get them to take away from it!!