OpenSciEd Unit 7.1 · Lesson 11 · 11.A
Look for: Students highlighting and annotating pieces f…
From Teacher Edition
Facilitation guidance from the lesson plan — what to notice in student thinking and how to respond while teaching.
Building towards
11.A Gather and communicate information from a scientific text adapted for classroom use to determine the central ideas of Dalton’s atomic theory with regard to the patterns in the particulate structure of matter that makes up all substances.
What to look / listen for
Students highlighting and annotating pieces from the reading about how Dalton and others represented atoms and molecules. Once they have finished the reading, they should record what they have figured out about how their representations of particles (molecules) and parts of particles (atoms) relates to what Dalton and his colleagues used as explained in the reading.
What to do
If you find some students going straight to highlighting, remind them to engage in step 1 first (reading through one page), as it is a strategy useful for making sense of any text they read. If you find some students not interacting with their reading after a few minutes, again, quietly go up to them and ask to look over the annotations they made so far. If they have a couple of annotations made, give them positive feedback (e.g., a thumbs up) and then encourage them to start thinking about how these ideas might be used to explain what is happening with the bath bombs.
Distribute copies of A summary of some historical investigations and discoveries into the particle nature of matter. Say, As you are reading, look for connections that help answer this question. When you are done, I want to collect this reading from you to assess your progress toward interacting with the text in ways that are helping you develop answers to the questions we are trying to make progress on as a class. First, let’s work with a small part of the text to start with to practice this.
Monitor student reading. Summarize the steps of the reading protocol on the slide. Ask if there are any questions. Give students about 5 minutes to complete the protocol.
Share out ideas. Ask students to share some examples of connections they found and their predictions for the two gases they identified as being produced from the battery investigation. Listen for ideas related to the introduction of atoms as smaller particles or pieces that make up larger particles. Help foreground that the term atom gives a name to an idea we previously developed in Lesson 8—that there might be smaller pieces that can be broken off of bigger particles—and in this case, it looks like atoms are the smaller pieces.