Engineering Meets Aquatic Ecology in the Building of Model Ponds

     My excitement and love for the 5th grade class at Bishop Dunn Memorial School after the Model Pond Building Inquiry lesson is uncontainable. The students blew me out of the water with their ability to work together, think critically, use the Tabletop Reference Book, learn as they explored, and automatically take on responsibility for this project and apply their learning in the same day.
The introduction went well. The students knew what a model was and about living and nonliving parts of an ecosystem. Not many of the students knew why we would make a model pond but by the end of the lesson they saw the importance and functions of having a model. I was glad that I was able to call on many different students who volunteered answers about why a model is important in science but if I were to do this lesson again in the future I would have the students turn and talk with their group members and then share out as a group what they came up with. This would get every student engaged in answering and it would also have gotten me better answers because two heads is better than one and more time to think and ponder while talking would lead to better arguments. My next wish was that I had planned a better transition from my introduction to the development in order to peek student interest in the building to come.  
The development was the best part of the lesson and best lesson by far. The students had a lot of ideas for the behaviors and expectations which increased class participation and made it their own. The students liked that they each had a job and took it very seriously which made the final product better and eliminated group rivalries or one student doing more than another. Following the pond guides fostered independence and also had students learning facts while creating their ponds. I had students coming up to me and using terms and concepts, such as "daphnia the translucent crustacean" that I was planning on teaching in the direct instruction lesson. I was so pleasantly surprised that they were exploring and applying information on their own. The checks for understanding were effective in that I was able to gauge what the students knew and what needed to be explained again in a different way. 
The students were not thrilled about worksheets on questioning and observing as a follow up to the totally engaging creation of model ponds but this guided practice is necessary to make sure students obtained the necessary information. After the first few minutes though students were writing all over the sheets about what they could see in their tanks and questions they had. They were fascinated. I was excited to see that they loved this project as much as I did.
The completed tasks helped me to understand the depth to which students mastered the objective by showing what they know about their models and how they can utilize them to learn. Being that this project would evolve into a science fair project and then a base for a case study I needed to be sure that the students knew how to observe and record their model ecosystem and understood the importance of this model and what was in it.
This lesson was so engaging for the students and they learned more in that hour than I thought ever possible. It was fun for me to watch them light up and show their true curiosity and love for learning. This lesson is one I would surely do again in the future. I would change my transitions and my independent practice to something more interactive or technology center though. Learning and growing and changing happen simultaneously.