Experiences

The use of different teaching approaches in biology classroom

Aivars Blūms

Latvia

Vocational School

Biology

Teaching in class, Laboratory, Extracurricular activity

Direct

I teach biology from 7th to 12th grade and nature science for 5th grade.
There are some discipline incidents during the lessons, because of students has hard times to sit still and listen to the curriculum.
This is why I try to pay attention to different experiments and practical works, at the same time explaining the theory.
For example, when I have lessons with 5th grade students, learning about heat, students have to make different temperature measurements of hot and cold liquids using digital thermometer, registering records in worksheets and at the same time I could teach the new topic about heat. In this way students may get the theory and practice, and at the end – marks, using worksheets.
5th grade students are very keen on working with microscope. For students, this gives lots of excitement to watch on something that is not visible with naked eye. Grate interest is paid to such objects that move, for example Cyclops and Daphnia.
Turns out that building bird cage out of the wood during home technologies lessons is very interesting and explorative process, because students could obtain different theoretical and practical knowledge.
With 7th graders at the beginning of the school year we get out and take a walk around Liepaja’s Seaside Park, where I tell students what kind of trees they could find here and how to recognize them. This is good way to teach kids the Botany. After that students are capable of recognizing trees all around the city. Sorry, but the fact is that students don’t have previous knowledge and experience to recognize sorts of the trees.
During the wintertime, when I teach about flowering plants, I try to use herbariums as a visual material, but at the springtime I use first plants that grows by it self. Students also take a part of making herbariums. They also are making interesting presentations about all sorts of plant families, mushrooms, lichens and bacteria.
To make learning process more interesting at 9th and 12th grade, when topic are related with the Anatomy and Physiology, I use visual materials, which I purchase on local Liepaja’s Peter market, for example – pork heart, livers, kidney, airways. During the lesson students could dissect these materials, could explore the structure of the organ, draw and write down what they have researched. These kind of lessons students love and are looking forward. Learning these topics students gets not only theoretical base of it, but also practical knowledge.
For 12th graders, during lessons about “Biotechnologies”, we organize field trips to biodiesel factory “Bioventa” and brewery “Užavas alus” at Ventspils district. Students take photos and write down the facts and as homework they make video presentations about the things they saw.
No matter of age of student, everyone takes a part of disassembling and then putting together human mockup, so they easily could learn the human internal structure and physiology.