When we have done the activities in class such as creating our own plants and having to name them or when we were using the water droplets to explore surface tension, I saw how involved we all got even as fully grown adults and how excited we were to participate in these activities. It really showed me how important these sorts of open activities are for kids because if adults are that excited, how excited are kids going to be about the same thing. There will probably be an even bigger wow factor for kids if they don’t already know what the outcomes will be or for kids who are usually less precise than adults to get far different results for their variety of ways of handling the task for the project.
I find that it added in the importance of the hands-on part of learning, since it is easy to have the teacher do an experiment for the class to watch but students will have so much more to pull away from an activity when they are involved rather than just observing. Students can come to their own conclusions when they know what they did and how to do it rather than just watching where they can get really distracted and get little to no learning since they are not involved.
I also feel like the concept of play based learning is something that I am far less familiar with so finding these simpler ways to incorporate play based learning is going to help me in my teaching quite a lot since when going into teaching having a few simpler ways to incorporate some of the important parts of how we are teaching now so that I can have time to get my footing as a teacher rather than trying to go 100% everywhere all at once which I feel like would be impossible early on.
It falls into helping students build their skills for the conducting portion of the BC science curriculum, which is where you often see the doing part of the learning.