Dino Unit: Problem-based learning

During a unit on dinosaurs, I had a large pretend dinosaur egg in a nest in the classroom. The students were told that in two weeks, a baby diplodocus would hatch and that we needed to prepare for it.

I presented the problem to the students that we don't know what baby dinosaurs need to live and that they would have to work together to get everything ready in time. The students made a list of questions they would need to answer, such as "do diplodocuses drink milk or juice?" I built the next two weeks of lessons around their questions.

For one of the lessons, I addressed the question "Will it eat chicken nuggets?" by discussing herbivores vs. carnivores. The students engaged in a sorting activity to make sure they understand the difference between meat and plants. Then, I revisited their question from last week and asked them how we can figure out if a diplodocus is a herbivore or a carnivore. One of the students suggested asking the baby's mother. Another suggested looking in our class library. We did both. While the paraeducator helped one group look through our class books for evidence of a diplodocus eating plants/meat, I led another group in composing a letter to the egg's mother. At the end of the lesson, the first group shared that they found a picture of a diplodocus eating leaves and was, thus, unlikely to eat chicken nuggets. The other group had to wait for the "dino mother" to write back. The next morning, the "dino mother" had left a response letter next to the egg, which confirmed the first group's findings.

This lesson shows how I use problem-based learning in my classroom. The entire unit centers around questions that the students want to have answered. However, I try very hard not to just give them the answers. I want them to learn how to think critically and do their own research. In this example, I provide a bit of background instruction (the baby will only eat chicken nuggets if it is a carnivore, not a herbivore) and then repose the question. I asked the students to come up with a method for answering it on their own. Since I had been teaching this skill since the beginning of the year, the students were able to come up with a couple different research methods (asking an expert and consorting a book).  After splitting into groups and trying both methods, the class came back together to share their findings with each other.