This is evidence from a summative assessment conducted to evaluate the childrens' new understandings as a prodduct of the Unit of Inquiry about materials and their properties, for the transdisciplinary theme "How the world works" from the Prymary Years Program. Children demonstrated their newly acquired knowledge on the following concepts:
Along with this, children showed their development of the following skills:
... and showed their understanding of the following lines of inquiry:
The assessment was a an open-ended task where students were asked to create a chair for a stuffed animal, "Mr. Bear". To do this, they had to choose among a set of materials: paper, rubber bands, clay, or lego blocks. Children worked collaboratively in groups of four, and had to organize themselves and make every decision to pursue the task. Children had to observe the materials they picked and use the knowledge they acquired throughout the unit to make decisions about the best way to build a chair for Mr. Bear. Because they knew that the materials to choose and the form to give them depended on the function that the final object would have, they also had to observe and analyze Mr. Bear. "Rubber bands are not so good, because rubber bands are rubber, they stretch, like this... so they are no good because they can't hold on. Plastic is good so - so, it is a little weak, but you can still do it (the chair), because it is not as elastic as the rubber bands". "Paper is soft and it falls. It's good because we use it witch scotch tape. Scotch helps make the chair more resistant, because Mr. Bear is heavy so it has to be resistant".
"Legos can be used to make houses, but toy houses, not real ones." "Legos are strong, I don't know why they are strong. They are strong plastic." "I think they have something hard inside them." "Mr. Bear can sit on this chair made of legos, because its hard, but a real person would fall, because people are more heavy".
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