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| Pile o' shoes |
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| Pile o' shoes successfully identified! |
Now THIS was a fun and effective lesson. The gist: without realizing it, students construct a "dichotomous key" of shoes. They then take what they learned from the activity and apply it to a worksheet where they have to use a dichotomous key to identify several different salamander pictures.
The students were super in to this activity. My one class even got volunteers out of the hallway to test the effectiveness of their shoe keys (hey, it was Friday before a long weekend). Cheers, smiles, and good times were had by all.
A few tips for the future:
-This is a lesson that only needs 30-45 minutes at most. It's fast-- plan to do other things along with it.
-In my small classes, we did the shoe key as a whole class activity (myself included). In my large class, I broke them down into groups of about 10. The groups were less effective-- as a whole class, the students really let their boundaries down and everyone participated without prompting. Not so much in the groups... for whatever reason, the students all went "full teenager" within their groups. They rushed through the shoe part, making sure to hint at how *cough cough LAME cough* it was every time I circulated through. From the worksheet results, I believe everyone still got the take home message regardless, but I do need to think about how to better implement this if I have to use groups again.
-Since the dichotomous key for the salamander worksheet is so short, many students wanted to use it backwards by just matching up the last description with each species. It took until my last class of the day for me to be wise enough to address this issue beforehand in our "post shoe" activity discussion. It fits in really well at that point, since many of the characteristics to differentiate the shoes are similar (color, laces, materials), making it so that they cannot accurately just jump to the end to identify a shoe.
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