Mystery In the Air Taking a Learning Plan That Extra Step

We did this activity with Mother Goose Time. I looked at my 'Assessment' and 'Reflection' to create a goal for myself (the teacher) and a goal for the kids (the learners).

Goals for the Kids:
My goal for the kids was to get them to make predictions and feel confident verbalizing those predictions before we begin testing.
If you live in a house with lots of kids, have multiple children in your care or teach in a classroom, you have probably noticed a variety of confidence levels and see these ebb and flow with different stages of development. It's easy to cater a learning plan toward the very confident and verbal learners. You know, the kids that are excitedly shouting out the answers or waving their hands in the air to give the answers, but the goal is to not leave any child behind and to invite our less verbal learners to give input and to grow in confidence that allows them give answers.
We do this by removing competitive elements. Rather than making the goal about giving the right answer first, the goal becomes about giving an answer once they have taken time to think about it. It also involves listening to answers their peers give and learning from each other.
Catering the Goal to Individual Learners:
For me, my oldest can have a tendency of shying away from giving an answer if he's unsure it's the right answer so my goal with him is to get him to start giving some ideas out loud and reminding him that we can always test his predictions later. I am careful not to correct wrong answers but give verbal prompts until they arrive at a hypothesis that we can test together.
I have another son who tends to blurt out responses without thinking them through so my goal with him is to slow down his thinking process, make sure he has fully listened to and understood the question first, and then sort information so that he can form a well thought out answer knowing that he understands rather than rapid firing verbal guesses.

Assess:
Did the child predict which object would stay in the air the longest?
All the kids have given ideas so now we are testing them by dropping them from up high.
We were testing a variety of materials - a kleenex, a scarf, a feather and a piece of paper to see how fast they fall and how well they float in the air.

Goal for Myself:
To extend the experiment.
Teaching this activity with this prompt in mind carried this activity on for much longer and led us places we would not have gone otherwise. Learning isn't always about simply ticking off the boxes in our lesson plan or meeting learning outcomes but about leading kids into learning as a lifestyle where our growth and pursuit of knowledge is led by our own curiosity; fostering that curiosity is the learning facilitator's role.

My plan: Following the drop test of the kleenex, scarf and feather I wanted to see if they could think of ways we might get different outcomes with the same objects.

Asking Guiding Questions-
What could we do to the kleenex to change how it floated in the air?
We then tried crumpling up the kleenex to see if it fell differently

Extending the Experiment with Paper Air Planes
What could we do to the paper to keep it in the air longer?
We then folded our paper into paper airplanes to allow the paper to glide much longer in the air. This led us into a whole lesson on aerodynamics. Grandpa was visiting and he showed the kids how to fold flaps on their planes to get the planes to cork screw, go straight up or nose dive.

If you'd like to give this a try, This is how we learned about aerodynamics and how flaps on wing flaps on a plane work to make the plane climb, descend or turn.

Folding Your Paper Airplane

Fold one flap up and one down to make your airplane cork screw

Fold both flaps up to make your airplane climb.

Fold both flaps down to make your airplane nose dive.

Extending the Experiment with Wind
How could we change the air to cause things to move as they fall?
We then brought the fan out and dropped things in front it so that they travelled as they fell.

Germs Float Through the Air
We also learned about how germs travel through the air and how to cough into our arms or sneeze into a kleenex so that we don't spread our germs.

Balloons Float Through the Sky - Our Craft

Disclosure: I receive Mother Goose Time Curriculum free of charge for educational purposes in return for posting my honest experiences using the curriculum. Photos of children featured on my blog for review of Mother Goose Time are used with signed consent of the child's parents. I welcome any questions or concerns.