The RCEF Blog 博客

Teacher Pei and I have focused on providing the 3rd grade students with a very hands-on science curriculum.

The funny thing about the science textbooks in China is that each chapter is filled with pictures and drawings of kids doing science experiments, but never clear instructions on how the teacher should allow his/her students to also do the science experiments. The textbook also details the results of the experiments, thereby giving students the answers so they never need to conduct experiments themselves–this is stupid.

Two projects from 3rd grade I want to highlight are: (1) students investigating plants around their school and (2) students creating a cartoon about snails.

(1) The goal was to have students use their five senses to investigate trees found around the school campus. The students were extremely excited (and a bit difficult to control) when Teacher Pei announced to the class that they’d be heading outside the classroom to conduct nature observations. Teacher Pei gave each student a sheet of computer paper to fold into four sections. In each section, they would describe and draw the tree’s bark, leaves, fruit, and overall structure. The pictures show students using crayons to rub tree barks on their paper.

(2) As hard as we tried, Teacher Pei and the students couldn’t find a live snail around the school for an experiment, which he blamed on the seasonal cold weather. Nonetheless, after reading about snails and watching YouTube videos of them crawling around and eating leaves, Teacher Pei and I designed a project for students to each create a cartoon of a snail. Students would first spend some time drafting a story, then grab some markers and start drawing their cartoon story. The pictures show students working on their story rough draft, selecting markers, and neatly creating their final product.

Note: We need more markers =(