Pre & Post Observational Activities for the Classroom
The following activities are ideas to help enhance classroom observational awareness. These are just suggestions to go along with the field trips to Thanksgiving Point.
The main intent of science instruction in Utah is that students will value and use science as a process of obtaining knowledge based upon observable evidence. The Science Core Curriculum places emphasis on understanding and using skills. Students should be active learners. The activities below will help enhance the students’ observational skills in all areas of their life.
Observation is:
- Paying close attention
- Using all your senses (feeling, seeing, hearing, tasting, and smelling)
- Seeing things from different angles, up close and for longer periods of time
- Recording what you have observed
- What did you notice?
- What do you wonder?
Field or Playground Observation Activity: To understand that observing things takes time and looking closely.
- Have students go outside for 10-15 minutes and sit on the ground. They will need paper, pencil and a magnifying glass if they are available. During the time the students look and record the things within a yard of where they are sitting. Come back together and discuss what they saw and what they wondered about.
Fruit Bowl Activity: Determine whether all pieces of one kind of fruit are exactly the same, or if they are different.
- Give each student a fruit. (Any item would work, but they need to be the same thing.) Ask the students if they think they all have the same thing. Give them 10-15 minutes to observe and record their fruit. Use magnifying glasses and measuring tools if they are available.
- Sample Questions to ask while they are observing:
- How big is your fruit? How long is it?
- What color is it? Is it all the same color?
- Are their flaws? Bumps? Bruises? Distinguishing markings?
- How can you use your other senses, besides your eyes? What does it feel like? Smell like?
- Once all the students have finished their observations, have them partner up and compare their fruit with another students. Repeat the process from above and have them compare their fruits.
- Wrap-up by discussing the results.
- Sample Questions:
- Did you originally think that all of the fruits were the same? Why or why not? What do you think now?
- What does this activity teach us about looking closely at our world?
- What did it make you wonder about?
Touch & Feel Box: Help to observe using other senses.
- Get a shoe box and place a hole in one end that is just large enough to slide a hand in and not be able to see into the box.
- Place an object into the box. Example: sea shell, fruit, toy, etc.
- The student feels the item inside the box and records their observations.
- A game can be made out of this by the students writing down what they think it is and then have a drawing with the right answers.
- A different item can be placed in the box daily or weekly and make this an extended observational activity.
Observational Books: These authors also have other books that are similar to these.
- Look Book by Tana Hoban
- Using full-color photographs, this concept book will have viewers scrutinize and think about what they see or don’t see. No text.
- Zoom by IstvanBanyai
- Open this wordless book and zoom from a farm to a ship to a city street to a desert island. But if you think you know where you are, guess again, for nothing is ever as it seems.
- I Took a Walk by Henry Cole
- Have you ever sat quietly near a stream, or in a meadow or a wood, and just looked and listened?
Science Core: Any subject that is taught can have a review of what observation is and then applied to that subject along with inquiry, questioning, formulating and testing hypotheses, analyzing data, reporting and evaluating findings.