OpenSciEd Unit 6.2 · Lesson 10 · 10.A
Look for: Cold water and room-temperature water both co…
From Teacher Edition
Facilitation guidance from the lesson plan — what to notice in student thinking and how to respond while teaching.
Building towards
10.A.2 Develop models based on evidence to explain that matter is made of particles that are in motion, and though the individual particles are not visible to the eye, their collective behavior can be observed as more or less movement depending on the matter’s temperature.
What to look / listen for
- Cold water and room-temperature water both contain particles that move around.
- The number of particles in the cold water and room-temperature water should be equal.
- The particles in the cold water are moving less than the particles in the room-temperature water.
What to do
Circulate around the room to view students’ drawings and get a sense of whether you need to pause and discuss any information source in more detail. If necessary, collect the notebooks to examine the drawings more closely and provide feedback. In the feedback, ask questions about parts of the model that would spur changes to the model, such as
What evidence do we have to support this idea?
How does the number of particles in each sample compare?
Are the particles moving more or less in each sample?
If students are struggling to grasp the connection between water movement and temperature from the reading, consider finding a video demonstration or online simulation of Joule’s experiment and apparatus. This may be particularly useful for emergent multilingual learners.
Compare models with a classmate. Project slide S. Ask students to turn to a partner and compare drawings. Say, What was something similar between your drawings? What was something different? Give students a few minutes to compare.
Bring students back together for a brief Building Understandings Discussion. Say, Before we move on, we need to brainstorm ways to show whether particles are moving very little or whether they are moving more. We need a common way to represent some of our ideas.
Generate ideas about representation of movement in models. Discuss each of the suggested representations and allow students to choose a way to represent greater and lesser particle movement in a liquid that they think is consistent with the evidence they have collected. The class can agree on the representation now or wait until Lesson 11 to agree on it, however you will need to tentatively choose one representation to use for a class model now, that can be retained or modified later.✱