5th Grade Electricity Activity - Tweaked ;)
This article is part of the “LP Tweaks Tuesday” blog series of showcasing how small adjustments to the questions, organization, and/or data moves within your existing curriculum can help align the learning to different data skills for your learners. This original lesson is strong, and the intention is not to communicate otherwise but rather to share how you could adjust things for a different desired outcome.
So imagine that you have a great data-based lesson from Tuva on Electricity Generation (*note this activity requires a Premium subscription) for your learners to work on concepts related to 5-ESS3-1. Your students are comfortable using Tuva and the lesson has gone well in the past.
However, based on your students performance in the last unit you are looking to give them more time to “Describe & Analyze the Pattern” and “Articulate Uncertainty” in a practiced way (see Building Blocks for Data Literacy to explore the corresponding data skills of these areas more).
You are torn, you like the Tuva lesson but you are worried the questions aren’t directly getting at the data skills your learners need to practice at this point in the year, but the content is. What do you do?
Let’s check out some optional tweaks/additions to make the lesson more what you need now.
Here is an example of how we can add a few questions to the lesson to more directly help your current students practice data skills we know they are weaker on (or we are more interested in targeting in this specific data interaction) at this point in the year.
Black text is part of the original lesson (which directs students to make a pie chart) and the blue text are suggested additional questions to add. A full copy of the revised lesson can be viewed here.
The first two questions help more directly get students to “describe visual patterns” in the data and the third question is designed to help students to “refer to uncertainty when reasoning about data” in grade 5 appropriate ways. They do not add a large amount to the workload of the students, but they do provide more targeted practice of these skills.
Therefore, with the addition of 3 new questions and a tweak of Question 4, you can now use a tried-and-true lesson of your curriculum while also better aligning it to your learners needs and/or your desired focus areas for your learners to practice data skills.
To me that feels like a win-win…using a lesson that you like with a more strategic data focus to help learners build their skills :)
Will this exact tweak work for everyone or every lesson? Absolutely not!
The point is that with a better sense of what we are working towards with data skills (see Building Blocks for Data Literacy to explore the range of data skills K-12 our learners should be working to master) we can be empowered to make our existing curriculum work better for us and our learners. Rather than needing to find new curriculum.
Give it a try! What in your next lesson with data can you slightly adjust to make it better hit the skills you want your students to practice? Let us know how it goes.
