Visualize the Rock Cycle

Visualize the Rock Cycle

    In class today, we did an activity in which my classmates and I physically moved through the rock cycle as rocks ourselves. While it might seem like a silly thing for college students to be doing, it really helped me visualize the rock cycle in my head, which will in turn help me on the quiz. I have mentioned this in previous posts, but having an interesting acitivy to pair with important content is extremely beneficial. 

    As a student, I can prove this theory myself. Throughout all my years of schooling, the class I remember the most is my 8th grade science class. This is because my teacher had a demonstration or lab prepared almost everyday. For key concepts that we spent more time on, this meant multiple hands-on acitivies that I could pair the content with. When I would take tests, I would focus on the lab associated with the specific question and could easily remember the information.

    This is something I will focus in in my future classroom. Project-based, hands-on learning has proven to be the most effective kind of learning for the reason I stated above. For concrete information such as the rock cycle, it is especially importnat that the student has an experience in which they can recall versus a few bullets on a PowerPoint slide. For me, this was the visualization that we did today in class.