Module 2 - Overview of Unit

Why inquire into the properties of materials, and why do it this way?

                                                            

    Image source: https://www.creativespotting.com/2013/07/22-marvelous-grass-sculptures/

Have you ever sat on a chair in someone’s house and been confused as to why they chose a beautiful chair, that wasn’t comfortable to sit on?

Have you ever been caught in the rain and wished you had bought the jacket with a higher waterproof rating?

Understanding materials and their properties allows us to better understand a fundamental cause and consequence relationship between materials, their properties and how we can choose to use them. As supported by Roden & Archer (2014 p. 118) materials are all around us and are part of our everyday interactions with the world, providing an important rationale for why they need to be explored and investigated by children of all ages. Roden & Archer suggest that the most important aspect of this for younger children is the opportunity for them to sort and classify materials, investigating what objects around them are made of and exploring and describing the properties of each of these materials. It is however one thing to learn about the properties of different materials by reading about them and testing them, and another thing to try and use this understanding by predicting, making and testing out our understanding through the design process.

“One of the most important aspects of science—yet perhaps one of the least emphasised in instruction—is that science involves processes of imagination. If students are not helped to experience this for themselves, science can seem dry and highly mechanical.” (Suzanne Donovan & Bransford, 2005, p. 406) As an educator working with young children I believe that it is fundamentally important that children understand how their learning can be used in the world outside the classroom, and how it can act as not only a way to understand the world around them, but also how it can be put to work as a tool in their imaginative tool kit that let’s them construct, create and produce.

This unit about Materials and their Properties has been designed for a Gr 1 class in an international school environment. Whilst independent of any curriculum framework, our school aims to ensure that our students have access to learning opportunities that are similar in nature to that of similar aged peers from the countries that our students are drawn from. On this occasion the unit closely addresses the Gr 2 Science Understanding Standards drawn from the ACARA (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority) and as our children in Gr 1 are of similar age to the students in Gr 2 in Australia, this proves to be an appropriate developmental expectation. The unit is designed to address a strand within our curriculum that requires students of this age to explore the classification of materials. Within our curriculum framework this is the first time our students explore an materials based unit. This however then leads onto units about waste and production of materials, providing an opportunity for students to learn more about the sustainability of materials and the consequences for their use. Within our inquiry skills continuum our focus for Grade 1 students includes the following skills, these skills have been carefully built into the unit at various stages of the inquiry and can be referenced in the unit using the coding system connected it each. They have also been cross referenced with the ACARA and are connected via this code on the planner.

Skills from School Based Inquiry Continuum:
S1: State some things they think they already know about a topic
S2: Ask ‘I wonder…’ type questions about a topic thinking about ‘What will happen if...?’ type questions about everyday objects and events
S3: Pose questions which compare things in terms of observable / measurable characteristics
S4: Gather information from experience ( eg. observation, experimentation etc.)
• Manipulate materials with guidance to test what happens and make observation
• Make simple predictions about concrete phenomena
• Use more than one sense to make observations
S5: Make close observations and describe what they notice orally
S6: Respond to an experience by capturing observations and thoughts in pictures, graphics, or simple sentences
S7: Sequence, order and rank information along dimensions provided
S8: Identify objects as same / different and sort them into groups based on given criteria sorting objects and events based on easily identified characteristics
S9: Compare new ideas with what was known at the beginning of the inquiry