PBL

Unit:  PBL

Anthony Choi

Part 1: Driving Question

“How can we prevent getting sick in our environment?” (Elementary Students)

The driving question gives the students an opportunity to do a little research about what makes them sick often. They can think of basic and simple examples like not washing their hands often, and they can also go in depth and look into actual symptoms of flus and viruses.

The goal of our DQ is for students to find solutions to maintaining a healthy life. Because the elementary students are going to be working with this driving question, it will require them to come up with simple lifestyle changes that could make themselves ‘clean’. Students will be able to find out very small changes that they could do to actually make a big impact on their environment.

Lesson 1: Grabber and Introduction

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vw0hIs2LEg

The Safe Sneeze by Mythbusters

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yToii3-p-NI
The Sneeze: How Germs Spread

Introductory Grabber:The students will be introduced to two short videos. The students are responsible for paying close attention to what is occurring in the two videos. The first video is a very interesting and also entertaining for the students because mythbusters usually make their videos an ‘experiment based’ video. Adam and Jamie are the two participants in the video; they have a large paper in front of them and sneeze to see how far the germs can reach. They use different techniques to cover their sneeze and see which one is the most effective. The second video is interesting in a way that it gives a realistic animation of how germs spread in our environment.

Introduce the Central Question:After watching the videos, the teacher will ask the students which method and technique they use to cover their sneeze. This question will not only get the students to engage but also share their personal and unique ways when it comes to covering their sneeze. The teacher can then ask a simple question from the first video, saying, “who have done what the animation character has done in real life?”, the question will also get the students to participate because the things that the animation character does, such as opening the door and touching food are things that students also do in real life. After an engaging discussion about the videos, the teacher will then present the driving question, “how can we prevent getting sick in our environment?”

Lecture: Is there more than one thing we can do to prevent from getting sick? What are those things and why. Other than going to the doctor and asking them questions, where can you get that information as well. What are some of the medicine that the students are very familiar with and use? Try to get the students engaged by asking if they like capsule medicines or liquids. Talk about ‘airborne’, medicine that’s considered pretty delicious because it tastes like carbonated soda when you put the pill in water.

Culminating Activity

Press Conference Activity
The structure for this activity is adapted from an activity developed by the Teachers' Curriculum Institute. Students are going to have a job assigned to them as a reporter for a magazine. They are going to interview the people around them and prepare some general questions. They can use their computers to access magazines and find images they would like to use on their poster project (described in more depth below).

Introduction: The students will interview anyone that they want. Whether it’s their parents, siblings, friends, or strangers and ask different ways to prevent sickness in our environment. After the students get enough feedback, they will then create a poster that shows the many different ways to prevent sickness. They will need a poster board, crayons, markers, scissors, glue, paper, and magazines as their materials. They can write down the information and try to find an image from magazines that relate to them. Also, they can decorate the poster with their crayons and markers by drawing images that relate to the information that they will talk about. Also, they will bring one item that prevents us from getting sick, like medicine, band-aid, or germ-X.

Lecture: Go around the classroom and ask the students to share one interesting way that they have learned from the interviews that prevents sickness in our environment. What knowledge did the students gain while finding out this information (research). Were they familiar with a lot of those answers?

Activity Overview: Act as a reporter for magazine and gather information that prevents sickness in our environment by interviewing their parents, siblings, elders, friends, etc. Bring a creative poster that addresses the driving question. A good amount of information and images that prevent sickness should be on the poster. Also, bringing an actual item such as germ-X, disinfecting wipes, band-aid that we use in our real world to prevent germs from getting everywhere.

Debriefing: The students will share to the class one interesting answer that they have received after they have interviewed people about the central question. Also, they will get a chance to present their creative poster that has information and images that prevent sickness in our environment. The poster will have been completed with markers, crayons, glue, scissors, and magazines to retrieve images from. The project will be graded on two things: how thoughtful and valid the information on the project is, and how creative and colorful the student got with their project. After showing their poster to the classroom, the classmates can have the time to ask the student about their poster. It can be simple questions that aren’t too hard to think about. The students have the decision to either leave their poster at school so it can be hung on the school hall or not so they can show other students at the school how to prevent sickness.  

Role Play: This activity will be an entertaining activity that the students will get to engage in after all the presentations. Half of the students in the classroom will become doctors and the other will become patients that have been sick. The ill-students will go to the doctors and ask for one solution to prevent sickness in their environment in the future. This will be a fun activity because students that are sick have the chance to act very ill and make the activity more interesting. The teacher will listen and observe how the students play their roles and answer any questions the students might have during the activity. After a few minutes, the doctors and the patients can switch their roles and continue the activity.