When I observed during my IMB semester, I unfortunately didnt get to observe as much

science as I would have liked too. I was at Community School of Davidson which was a charter
school. The class I observed was a second grade class, it had 24 students total, 12 boys and 12
girls. In my classroom all students but one, was on grade level. A couple of students needed
assistance in reading and speech. Most of the students in the classroom were Caucasian. While I
was at my school they were doing a huge social studies unit on culture that included them doing
hands-on activities every day. Some of these activities included cooking and while this would be
considered science the teacher did most of the measuring and only let the students do certain
parts since they were working with a small stove. One day when I was there students that were in
the Science Club at the Community School of Davidson High School came over to the class to
teach a lesson on science to my second grade class so I am choosing this to write about.
The topic of this lesson was Did You Hear that Sound? The high school students got all of
the kids in groups of 6 which made 4 groups. Each group had one high school student. The
students worked through a serious of experiments to fill out a given worksheet about how sound
works. One of the activities that they did was they had 3 glass bottles with three different
amounts of liquid in each one. The high schooler told the student what pitch was, and then hit
each glass bottle with a spoon. The students then had to circle the picture on the worksheet of the
bottle that had the lowest pitch if you were to hit it with the spoon. In the next activity the
students all got to have a ruler and they put it at the edge of the table. The first time the students
had the ruler almost all the way off the table and then held the end of it to the table and flicked it
with their other hand to hear the vibrations. After they did it this way they put the ruler halfway
on the table and flicked it again to hear the difference between the vibrations. The students had to
work together to decide which way made a lower pitch and which way made the higher pitch.

The next activity the high schooler told all of the students to put their head down on the table and
took a metal spoon and tapped it down on the table. The students were supposed to talk about
how loud it sounded to them. The students then took a piece of string and tied it to the end of the
spoon and wrapped both of their pointer fingers around the two pieces of string, put their fingers
in there ear and move the spoon into the side of the desk. This was supposed to cause a different
vibration of sound and the students had to decide which one they thought was louder and caused
more vibrations. The next activity they had a string tied to two buckets each filled with rocks and
the string laid elevated over a carton and they were able to pluck the string that was tied to the
buckets and hear how it makes sound and vibrations on the string when it was pulled tight
compared too if there was no rocks in the buckets where they could hear that it wouldnt make as
much of a sound or vibration. They had to write what they learned from this activity on their
worksheet. The last thing they did was cut straws to make a kazoo, you have to blow it a certain
way and have your lips a certain way for it to work so some of the students got it right away and
for some of them it took a lot of practice. It was neat to see the class come together and try to
help other classmates that couldnt get it too work right. They really worked together to make
sure that everyone was able to do it successfully. The ended the lesson by showing a video of
guys blowing into glass bottles with liquid in them at different heights to the YMCA song. The
students loved this! They sang along with the video and thought that it was the neatest thing.
Some of the students even said that they were going to go home and try it themselves.
I observed the Second Strand during the observation, I observed this when the students
made claims of which one they thought was louder with the spoon banging on the table or the
spoon with the string in the students ears banging on the table. They talked about it after and
made their decision based on evidence from what they heard. If they didnt agree the students

asked to do the experience again to see if they would change their mind and most of them would.
Strand two was used throughout all of the activities because they would have to come up with
their answers for their worksheets based on the evidence they got from the activity. Strand three I
feel like was also used during this lesson; the high schoolers would ask the students before
moving to another activity to clarify how they know which one was the right answer. The next
activity would build off of what they learned before that. Strand four was used at certain times, I
feel like when they made their straw kazoos the students were able to play around and make their
work and ideas public, they talked about how to make different pitches by moving their mouths a
certain way. They worked all together as a group to help each other work their kazoos. Although
during the end video they didnt sum up every activity that was talked about they did sum up
pitch and they talked again about how the different levels of liquid in the glass bottles make
different sounds.
During this lesson I feel that mostly Teacher/Student interactions occurred. The high
school students would explain to the kids what to do and the students did it and then they would
explain more about it. At times they would ask the kids what they thought the answer would be
or which one was the loudest and the students would talk for 30 seconds all at once and they
would just tell them to circle the answer on the worksheet. For each question on the worksheet
the high schoolers would explain what to do with the given materials and even show them first
and then the kids passed around the objects at the table and tried them by themselves. I did not
hear any of the groups talk with their students and try to connect the experience with their daily
lives. This disappointed me because sounds are everywhere, and they could have talked to the
students about the sounds that they hear on a daily basis and relate it back to the activities they
were doing. Overall I feel like the students learned a lot about sound from this experience. A

couple days after the lesson, I heard and saw one of the students tapping on the water bottles
right before lunch time with their pencil and a couple of the other classmates came over and were
talking about pitch and which one was the highest and lowest. I thought that this was really
awesome because the students remembered about pitch and were having a discussion by
themselves student/student. Although they didnt learn how it connected to their daily lives, they
still seemed to remember the activities and what they learned through the activities about pitch,
and vibrations.