How Your Eye Sees an Object?

The 5th grade students have continued working through their senses unit. Recently, a classroom teacher and I, planned a lesson to allow the students to work towards learning how their eye actually sees an object. The CT Science Framework asks the students to "create a diagrams that show the straight path of light rays from a source, to a reflecting object to the eye, allowing the object to be seen." We decided to pull in a variety of texts, both in print and digital, for the students to use. This allowed the students to continue working on synthesizing information from a variety of non-fiction texts.

The students were put into groups prior to beginning this lesson. Once they were in their groups they were given a graphic organizer, which can be found below, and given a certain amount of time to read the short text and find the information they needed. We used the Online Stopwatch, a favorite of mine, to allow the students to keep track of the time they had left in each station.

How Does Your Eye See an Object?

We reminded the students during each station that their evidence should be focused on helping them answer the focus question we provided. This was a big help to the students and kept them aware of the task at hand. Students then had to make a claim based on the evidence they collected. 

Once the students were done with the stations, we allowed some time for the group to form a plan to create their diagram. Each group had an iPad and we had them use Doodlecast Pro. We chose this app primarily because down the road we are going to use it in much more detail. We did not tell the students all the features of the app, but just wanted them to be able to create their diagram and record their voice. There are a ton of apps out there that we could have used, but like I said this is something we plan on using in the future in much more detail. 

Each video was created, saved to the Camera Roll on the iPads, and then combined into one video using YouTube Capture.