Overview of Lesson Plan

Since differentiating between chemical and physical changes and their properties does not occur for students until later middle school grades, I decided to put most of the focus on observing physical changes in at a fourth grade level. In this lesson students will have to describe the physical characteristics of several different substances and objects, and manipulate them by physical changes. They will also learn about the causes of a physical change. Students will be able to work together in groups to make observations and drawing conclusions from those observations. Taking notes and making sketches are important aspects to being a good scientist, so I have included this aspect as a part of what I learned from Ms. Mary Myron. Students will feel free to ask the teacher questions, and as the teacher circulates through the room, he/she will ask probing questions to each group as they conduct their experiment. There will be minimal guidelines on what they are to observe, they just need to write down everything they see or notice. The class will be able to come up with their own definition of what physical change means from what they had learned from all five experiments. This way, the students have experience and interacted with the definition, instead of just reading it from a book. For extending what they have learned in class, instead of doing a worksheet or something boring, they will go home and find different examples of physical changes around their house.