OpenSciEd Unit 8.3 · Lesson 05 · 5.A
Look for: When we bring the magnets close together when…
From Teacher Edition
Facilitation guidance from the lesson plan — what to notice in student thinking and how to respond while teaching.
Building towards
5.A Use a computer interactive to model the effect on the patterns in the magnetic field when we add an electromagnet to the single magnet system.
What to look / listen for
An ideal response might look like this:
- When we bring the magnets close together when the forces are attractive, then we will observe them move toward each other and stick together.
- When we bring the magnets close together when the forces are repulsive, then we will observe them wanting to push away from each other and when we let go they will fly apart.
- The prediction itself is useful as a tool for motivating the activity in the next lesson. But the most important thing to assess is not the content of the prediction but the students’ comfort with using the cause-effect sentence starters to formulate their predictions based on their models.
What to do
If students are still struggling to apply this structure to their predictions correctly without a more explicit scaffold, consider returning to the Lesson 1 slides introducing the use of the fill-in-the-blank scaffold to describe cause-and-effect relationships. Insert these slides at the beginning of Lesson 6 and use a familiar system (e.g., a falling cell phone) to practice making predictions. You might also consider using a video of a Rube Goldberg machine to practice describing cause and effect.