Getting Ready for Fieldwork!

Two Days to Go!
In two days, the adventure begins! I am very excited to meet all of the students and start working with them. To build a rapport with the students, my fieldwork group will be playing a game to get to know them and test their prior knowledge. Our game is called "Saturn's Spectacular Science Showdown." It consists of a game board with 12 squares, a spinner app. and three sets of question cards. The question cards are broken into three categories, "All About Me" (questions about the students), "Spectacular Science Questions" (questions regarding space and technology), and "7 Second Challenges" (the student have 7 seconds to complete a challenge based on space and technology questions).  Despite there only being three categories of question cards, there are four categories in the game. The fourth category is "Ask the Teachers" and in this category, the students get to ask the teachers (my group members and I) anything they would like to know about us. I think this should be a fun category because most of the time the students only get to hear facts about their classmate and do not get a proper introduction to the college students they will be working. I performed a similar activity with my fieldwork group last semester in Language Arts Methods. The only differences were that I had an extra category called, "Say What" (these cards had random fun facts on them), and instead of the students asking me questions, I had facts about myself on the cards already. 
I am really excited to teach our lessons on technology! At first, our group was really over thinking the whole unit plan. We were all a bit hesitant having received technology as our topic. The phases of the moon and planets seemed so much more inviting and intriguing than our topic. Honestly, I believe we were all kind of feeling technology would be dry and not as exciting to teach. Then we started to put our minds together. We realized all we needed to do was think outside the box a little bit more and the world lit up. In hindsight, I believe we ended up with the best topic because technology is used in almost everything. One of the lessons our group thought of possibly doing was an inquiry lesson on telescopes. I was thinking about naming it "I Spy Constellations." In this lesson, the students would be tasked with creating a telescope out of construction paper. Once they have done so, each group would be given a set of constellations to look for. After discovering what each constellation looked like, they would have to come up to the large poster on the front board that has all the constellations in our night sky and use their telescopes to spot their particular constellations. Once they have found the constellations, they will draw them as they see them on the poster. 
Another lesson idea that we discussed involved the students starting a new colony on Mars. Once the students got to Mars, they had to work together in groups to decide what technology they needed to help them survive. Along the same lines of that lesson, a third lesson we discussed was how technology helped improve the lives of farmers. In this lesson, were want to do something similar to what we learned during Project Wild a few weeks ago. In Project Wild, we played a game where everyone was bears and we had to collect poker chips one at a time that represented the resources needed to survive. Some "bears" had handicaps, like a broken leg, that make their collecting a bit harder than the rest of us. The way we wanted to incorporate something similar into our lesson plans was by making all of the students farmers. There would be some kind of marble or token in the middle of each table that would represent the crops for that year. The students would have to collect their crops one by one the first "year," representing farming by hand. The next "year," some groups would have paper cups, representing tractors, to help them bring in more than one crop at a time. The next "year," some groups will have holes in their cups, showing the impact of broken equipment. After each "year" we will keep track of how many crops each group brought in and the trends they see. 
I can't wait to put some of these lessons into action in a few weeks! I believe the students will really enjoy all of our lessons. I also believe that our lesson will be very valuable to our students' understanding of how technology has improved our lives. Let us finally begin the Spectacular Space Adventure!