In teaching the following lesson I have decided to implement the Jigsaw collaborative activity. Lesson:
Goal: Students will develop a deeper understanding of interdependence within ecosystems by examining how plants and animals interrelate in a saltwater marsh. Objectives: Given pictures and written information of saltwater marsh plants and animals, each student will do the following: 1. Identify and describe important facts regarding saltwater marsh plants and animals.
2. Integrate information from all three areas of the salt marsh (tidal changes, plants, and animals) and incorporate new vocabulary words (salt marsh, tide, cordgrass, marsh hay, burrow, gills) by writing a paragraph with at least five integrated facts.
Steps used in the Jigsaw activity: 1. Put students in groups of 6. This will be the “home groups”. The rational for number of students in the group, is to ensure that the number of students coincides with the number of sections that the lesson was divided into. Since there are 6 different types of saltwater marsh plants and animals there should be 6 students per group. 2. Assign a group leader. This student should be a responsible and mature student. The rational for assigning a group leader is to have a student that can keep the group on task and focused. 3. Divide the lesson into 6 sections. The principle of breaking the lesson up is to help the students take a large project and put it into manageable chunks by dividing a large lesson into smaller chunks it will be easier for students to learn about the lesson. a. Salt Marsh b. Tide c. Cordgrass d. Marsh hay e. Burrow f. gills 4. Assign each student in the home group one of the sections from the lesson. Each student will be responsible for reading about just that one section of the lesson. Group members study just their part in preparation for sharing with the expect group. So if a student is assigned to the