WaterCycleFacetsExample

If you know you want your students to learn the water cycle as part of your unit, here are samples of some of the different products they could produce demonstrating their understanding of the water cycle, using each of the different facets. You wouldn't do the water cycle lesson six times. Pick the facet that best suits the higher order thinking that you want your students to attain while they are learning the water cycle. Maybe one suits your conceptual lens. Maybe one suits a learning style that you want to address more fully.

• Can **Explain** via generalizations or principles: provide justified and systematic accounts of phenomena, facts, make insightful connections and provide illuminating examples or illustrations. -- //Explain the water cycle to a group of first graders. They'll need to know not just what it is, but why it's important to them. [Technology: a comic uses more visual presentation and less text-based presentation which is developmentally appropriate for first graders.]//

• Can **Interpret**: tell meaningful stories; offer apt translations; provide a revealing historical or personal dimension to ideas and events; make it personal or accessible through images, anecdotes, analogies and models. -- //Design a guided tour through the water cycle. Your students are a tour guide who are giving a tour to some tourists. Maybe they're on the Magic School Bus. "And on your right is the sun. It's shining brightly which excites the water molecules on the surface of the lake . . . " [Technology: pretend it's a walking tour like the tape recorders in a museum and make a podcast.]//

• Can **Apply**: effectively use and adopt what we know in diverse and real contexts--we can "do" the subject. [No example for this one. You apply your knowledge of facets and brainstorm a water cycle lesson that would exemplify the //Apply// facet.]

• Have **Perspective**: see and hear points of view through critical eyes and ears; see the picture. -- //Your students become the sunshine or a tea kettle or one of the things that causes water to evaporate. In the next stage of the water cycle, they become the cloud. In the next stage they become winter or a freezer or. . . Instead of being the water molecule, student become the "force" that is causing the water molecule to go through its change. A group of students write a script of a news reporter interviewing the forces for all the stages of the cycle and giving the various perspectives. [Technology: turn the interview into a newcast (movie) or radiocast (audio recording)]//

• Display **Empathy**: find value in what others might find odd, alien, or implausible; perceive sensitively on the basis of prior direct experience. -- //Write a journal, "A day in the life of a water molecule (water drop)". "Today, my buddies and I are lazing around in a puddle on a sidewalk. Life is leisurely, we're close together and feeling lazy. Then the sun peeks through the clouds. Well that gets us all excited. Next thing you know, I'm . . ." [Technology: Use a blog; write each stage of the water cycle as a separate blog entry.]//

• Have **Self-Knowledge**: show metacognitive awareness perceive the personal style, prejudices, projections, and habits of mind that both shape and impede our own understanding; be aware of what we do not understand; reflect on the meaning of learning and experience. //-- The human body is over 50% water. When you exercise that water is secreted from inside the body to the skin's surface in the form of sweat. Sweat is a liquid, but what happens next? What is your body doing? What does it feel like when the liquid evaporates? When does your body turn water vapor into liquid? How? What does it feel like? Our bodies rarely turn water into ice. Why? When does it happen (hopefully not to you)? Express your understandings of the water cycle as it relates to you and your body. [Technology: If students are freely allowed to express this self-knowledge (write a play, a journal, a poem) in a non-technology way, the same openness could be applied to a technology product (create a movie of your play, share your journal in a self-narrated audio recording, share your poem in a glogster creation//)]