Tina Bryn LabLearner Teacher
With school back in session and flu season fast approaching, many of us teachers find ourselves asking the same question. ‘What are we going to do to catch children up who miss labs and discussions?’
The answer to this ‘simple’ question is not so easy. We need to look at some different variables. When having to schedule lab times it is difficult to have a student make-up a lab. Here is one way that I used to catch a student up; I had the student who missed time just discuss with his/her group and ask what happened. I found this strategy to be ineffective. What ended up happening is the group members would just let the student copy his/her student data record. Instead of relying on their group members I would have the student just get the data information and then make sure they were present for the post lab discussions. This doesn’t seem to affect the auditory learners, but in some cases the kinesthetic and visual learners will need the lab to associate and put all the pieces of the puzzle together.
Another approach that I have tried this year is to have the student watch the video of the lab process, give him/her data, and discuss what they would have observed in the lab. They will get the rest of the concepts when we discuss the questions in the post lab and focus questions the following days. If a student misses multiple days I will meet with the student individually before, after, or during school. I follow this same process as I mentioned above. My only concern is that the student is not able to acquire the hands on experience and see the results of the investigations or get rephrasing in the class discussions. The only down fall I have noticed is that when missing multiple labs, the student doesn’t perform as well on the post-test.
Knowing our students as well as we do, we will be able to decide which ones will need the hands on part for some of the labs. With this in mind I have meet with some students before or afterschool and we will do the lab together. I will have as much set up before hand as possible. Obviously this takes extra time on the part of the teacher and in most cases time doesn’t allow for this.
As a teacher, I also look at the student’s strengths and weaknesses to best fit their needs of understanding concepts. I have found that if a student only misses a day or two, it is easy to catch the student up since discussion is on the same concepts for a month. However, this year I am finding students missing weeks at a time, and this is why I am trying the video and discussion method. The hard part about this is that the lower elementary doesn’t have videos available.
Lower elementary teachers seem to be approaching this idea from different angles. Some of the teachers have waited to do the lab day until all of the students are present. This is easier for the lower elementary since teachers do not need to do a lab every week to complete the curriculum before the end of the school year. Other teachers have chosen to go ahead with the lab making sure that the student is in attendance during the post lab, or had a peer explain what they observed during the lab. This seems to work with the lower elementary. Not only does the missing child get caught up with what happened, but the student getting to do the explanation is reviewing the concepts in his/her own words without even realizing it.
One teacher that I have visited with has even sent home labs to be done with the parents. With us being a small rural school we get to know our families well. She doesn’t send home the missed lab with all students, but she will send it home with parents that she’s knows will do the lab and return the materials. She has done this twice in the last two years with good results. One was the Exploring Electricity investigation 3 and the other one was the Property of Matter investigation 4. Both times she gathered the needed materials and using one of the experiment only containers, sent everything home. She found this way to be beneficial. The student didn’t miss the lab and she wasn’t trying to find the time to fill the student in on what was missed. Understand that this won’t work with all families. She doesn’t do this will all labs or all parents; just easy to do labs and to parents that are involved and will complete it. The student is then able to become involved with the post-lab discussions and not just have to sit back and listen.
Tina Bryn – I teach for the Barnes County North School District at the North Central campus near Rogers, North Dakota. We are a K-12 school with an enrollment of about 155 students. I teach 6th grade, except for Social Studies, and 7th and 8th grade Science. This is my third year teaching the middle school curriculum for LabLearner. Being a kinesthetic learner myself, I love the lab base approach. I also love this program from a parent standpoint. My children are in preschool, first grade, and third grade, and they are already loving science and using terminology that I didn’t use until much later.
