Investigating in Science
Developing and Communicating Scientific Understanding
Colourful Messages
Science in the New Zealand Curriculum
Achievement objectives
Level 5: Making Sense of the Nature of Science and Its Relationship to Technology
Students can use their knowledge of a scientific idea to identify and describe examples of technology in which that idea is applied.
Levels 3 and 4: Developing Scientific Skills and Attitudes Processing and interpreting: Students can use organised data and scientific ideas to suggest an answer to their selected questions and problems and make an evaluation of their investigation.
The teacher's intended outcomes were for the students to:
use scientific ideas to explain how we see coloured light
use colour filters to explain how we see coloured objects
investigate to find patterns in order to solve a problem.
The intended outcomes were aligned to the following "big ideas":
Surfaces and materials can transmit, absorb, or reflect light.
Visible light is made up of seven colours.
The colour of objects comes from their reflection and absorption of different parts of the spectrum.
Coloured light can be produced by selecting and blocking some parts of the spectrum.
A coloured filter blocks some parts of light and transmits other parts.
Scientists identify and use patterns and trends.
The teacher took these "big ideas" and most of the activities from Light and Colour, Building Science Concepts, Book 10 and GEMS Colour Analyzers. The activities were fun and challenging, and they used real contexts. The teacher used them to keep the students focused on the scientific understanding she wanted them to develop.
The teacher introduced the unit with the activity "Decoding Secret Messages" in GEMS (pages 5–15). The students wrote their initial explanations of why they could see a secret message in a puzzle when they looked through particular coloured filters. They then used Light and Colour to explore activities around the concept of light: letting light in and shutting it out, bouncing and travelling light, and reflection, transmission, and absorption.
They made their second attempts to explain how the filters enabled them to decode the message before exploring colour wheels as mixers of coloured light in Seeing Colours (Building Science Concepts, Book 11) and the question "Why does an apple look red?" in GEMS (pages 31–36). Finally, the teacher asked the students to create a present for a friend that included a set of "magic glasses", a secret message, instructions on how to use the glasses, and an explanation of how the "magic glasses" work.
Teacher-student conversation
Discussing Trent's second explanation:
Teacher:
What did you mean when you said, "All the other reflected colours cannot go through the filter and bounce off"?
Trent:
The reflected colours don't bounce off the filter, but they are absorbed by it [the filter]. That's what I really meant.
Teacher:
What did you mean when you wrote "green consists of yellow"?
Trent:
I mean that green includes the colour yellow in its make-up.
Trent went on to create his secret message. You can read his message through a green or red filter (for example, green or red cellophane).
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