Experiences

CD experiment

Irina Rotariu

Romania

Lower Secondary School

Biology

Teaching in class

Direct

Science lessons can be accessible if students are engaged to work in teams. Science classes give students plenty of opportunities to work in teams; tasks are distributed among the members of the team. Pupils get easy tasks according to their capacities. They learn how to help each other in order to accomplish their tasks. They learn to listen and negotiate; they learn to be patient and pay attention to what is happening around them. Observation and drawing conclusions from one’s experiences are very important in this respect. I remember the lesson I had about light and colours. I found it very difficult to introduce to my pupils the explanation given in the textbook. It was too abstract and it was obvious that my students did not understand me. I talked about my predicament with one of my colleagues and she suggested using the CD experiment. So next lesson I came into the classroom with a CD, hold it in front of the window so that my pupils could see a lot of colours, all the colours of the rainbow. Everybody was happy because my pupils understood my point: I had managed to get my message across in a very simple way through an accessible handy experiment.