Making connections across the curriculum
It has been a while since my last post and that has a lot to do with the fact that my lessons haven’t easily aligned with the solar panel project. Last year with the wind turbine I found myself forcing lessons around the project, and it did not go smoothly. This year when the subject matter fits I use it and I find the students get more involved when they are working with it periodically rather than every lesson. What I have been doing is following the lessons in Mr. Hill’s class and talking to him all the time about his experiments and findings and then we work together to put it in a manner that I can use in my class.
Now we are heading into the time where the solar project helps out in math class. We are starting ratios, fractions, proportions, percents and scale drawing. When we start the lessons I know the students have already touched on all these objectives in Mr. Hill’s class. We will get into each lesson and go over all the rules and vocabulary words and do our problems from the text book, then I will use the information from the solar panel project and let the students discover where they can apply what they have learned. We are trying to get outside and work so they can install the solar panels but the weather isn’t cooperating. Hopefully next week we will be able to get outside and measure the greenhouses, so that we can then create a scale drawing or a model to work with in math.
