Science! Science! Read All About It!

This week, we completed our Science in the News projects. After last week's class, we were given a homework assignment where we had to search for seven to ten astronomy-related articles from the popular press. We were suggested to use Newsela. I have used Newsela in the past for Social Studies Methods, and I enjoyed using it. I found seven articles and created a Glogster poster to share my article collage. I read all the articles and provided summaries of each on my poster. Here is the poster I created that contains the articles I found and descriptions of each.

 Here is the link to access the poster and the links to each article. A lot of the articles dealt with Mars and certain discoveries. This is a big issue in current issues in astronomy. I was always fascinated by astronomy and I am very interested in the discoveries of Mars so I enjoyed this project. One article that stood out to me was one about how astronauts will be traveling to Mars in 2030. This stood out to me because 2030 is in 14 years and my students may be old enough in 2030 to actually travel to Mars. This would be a great article for students to not only inform them on this current issue in the world, but to pique interest and inspire students. This current issue relates to the classroom discourse since it deals with space and planets. I can use these articles whenever I teach lessons on space to students. I think it's important for students to see that the content they're learning does matter as it can be a current issue in the world. In my own classroom, I will provide students with Newsela articles on topics that we are learning about to have the students become knowledgeable of what is happening in the world that relate to the curriculum. Using news articles will also give students a better understanding of what they are learning as they can see it being applied in the world.

We came into class on Tuesday and were provided with an inquiry lesson on teaching space science. To engage us, we were given a list of planets and aspects of the Solar System and had to choose one to define and create a slide on a class slideshow. I chose meteors and created two slides describing meteors. Here is the link to the class slideshow. My slides are 28 and 29. After we created our slides, we had to create a list of astronomy-related words that appear in each scrapbook item. Using the words from the list, we had to design a word cloud. We were provided with a list of word cloud tools including wordle, tagul, WordArt, TagCrowd, ABCya, and Tagxedo. We were put into groups of three. I worked with Keilani and Jack. First, we created our list. We found many words in our articles, including galaxies, asteroid, NASA, Mars, space, astronauts, and many more. Then, we created our word cloud. Wordle was pretty simple to use and it was nice because you didn't have to create an account to use it. You simply click on create and you type in your words in a text box. We included all of our words and then clicked, "Go". Our wordle popped up and we saw that asteroid was bigger than the rest. We went back to our list and saw that asteroid was on the list twice. This taught us that if you add a word twice to list, it will come up in a bigger font than the rest of the words. Here is our wordle. 

After we created our word cloud, we then had to create a timeline of discoveries associated with the astronomy-related words we found in our articles. We were given a link to timeline makers. Here is the link we used that contains many free tools to create timelines. We chose TikiToki to use to create our timelines. At first, we struggled with figuring out how to use it and we needed some help. As we worked on our timeline, we got more familiar with the tool. We added five events to our timeline. We included when the first asteroid was discovered, when starts were approved to have similar characteristics of the sun, when NASA was formed, when the term "astronaut" was created, and when the first astronaut went to space. We didn't have a lot of time to create our timelines and to make it more presentable but we added a stars background. Here is the link to our timeline. We presented it to the class and also, got to see all the other group's word clouds, timelines, and the tools they used. 

This project was a great way to learn more about space science. We got to explore to deepen our knowledge of astronomy vocabulary and different discoveries related to space. This project also provided us with different tools to incorporate technology in our own classroom. We now know different tools to create word clouds. Using word clouds as an introduction can be a great way to assess students' background knowledge. You can provide the word cloud of the words that will be presented in the lesson and see which words the students know or have heard of. I enjoyed creating timelines of discoveries. Instead of having students create timelines by hand, they can digitally create timelines using the tools we were provided with for this project. This project also demonstrated to me the importance of informing students of the current issues of the world. I will most definitely use Newsela in my future classroom. Overall, I enjoyed this project and learned a lot about space science and how to teach it to students.