Hi,

We had community speakers in the PAYBAC program present to our classes this last Thursday. As a BDA activity I found a series of articles on Science careers in an older Science World Magazine to be used on Monday. I arranged the students in my 8th grade Physical Science classes in groups of 4 and each student read silently one of the articles (their choice) and made a list of any vocabulary words they were not familiar with. They individually completed the BDA outline that Erik had supplied. After completing the BDA they were to write their own definition of the words they did not know. When they completed this they re-told the article to the other three group members. Those members were then ask to write a short paragraph explaining what they were told about the other articles.

Upon review of the exercise I believe the students not only learned from the experience but also enjoyed it on a number of levels. Although I did not instruct them to share their vocabulary lists I noticed several groups actually asking each other about the possible meanings of these words. In the future on similar exercises I believe I will ask them to share these as well.

Phyllis