Video: Two Visiting Scientists Explain Pollination!
In this video, a Foundation-Year 1 teacher invites two visiting scientists to explain to the class how pollinators and plants help each other. The learning area is Science. The lesson follows on from previous lessons on the same topic. As a class they have already discussed how living things help each other to survive and thrive. This lesson is a consolidation lesson. The students out the front are practising an explanation about how bees help plants and plants help bees.
This lesson is followed by an extension of this content, when the class discusses how humans can help other living things survive and thrive when they are in need.
Key Messages
- Notice how the teacher identifies this activity as part of science. The girls are wearing lab coats (they had already discarded the safety glasses as too nerdy), and the teacher informs them that they are going to be talking as scientists. (This will be contested by many science teachers who want science to be found everywhere, and don’t like the lab coat idea. The takeaway is that the teacher is marking this as science, rather than everyday talk.)
- When the first girl begins to talk, she begins with ‘One day a bee goes to a flower…’. This is not an explanation, it is a more familiar text type: narrative. For a language conscious teacher, this beginning signals to her that more support is needed, that the task of explaining is not clear. When the teacher stops her, to ask her to talk more loudly, the girl clams up.
- Notice how the teacher’s level of scaffold changes. She significantly increases her level of scaffold, with prompts, repeating and reframing and encouraging. This level of support is just what was needed, and the performance is completed successfully.