Jenno’s Ool

Saturday, March 26, 2005

CSI In Class

It's a constant challenge to keep the attention and interest of the kids in class. It's been said time and again that, if you can keep the topics "real", you've got a better chance of hooking them into the lesson. CSI seems to be the most cross-curricular show on the networks at the moment and can be a good segway into different topics. So far I've used CSI in my ITT (Intro to Technology), Ecology, and Physical Science classes. The kids tend to get really animated when they think their teacher's going off topic, such as talking about a tv show, but don't seem to mind when the connection is made back to the course.

In the ITT class for example, we were talking about how molds and castings were made. The kids seemed to be having a hard time grasping the idea until I related it to what they saw on CSI (Warrick casting impressions of footprints) ... then the lights went on. They were even keen to try doing some castings themselves! In Ecology, we had been talking about decomposers; some of the kids were "grossed out" and wondered aloud what would want to eat dead stuff and how things decomposed. We talked about Grissom's bugs -- the light went on again.

It's so nice to see the lights go on like that; it's one of the main reasons I went into teaching in the first place.

Posted by Jennifer at 5:40 PM | Comments (0)  

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