Summary Of Close Encounters Of The Amphibious Kind

“Close Encounters of the Amphibious Kind” by Tammy D. Lee and Jane L. Lubischer discusses a lesson that integrates physical science, focusing on the concept of sound, and life science, focusing on how sound is created in nature. This lesson concentrates on frogs, how they make sound, how the sounds they make are different, and the purposes of these different sounds. I will reflect on this article by summarizing it, discussing the standards accompanying it, and how I would implement this lesson in my future classroom. When discussing how I would implement this I will focus on modifications, processes, skills, and knowledge to be cognizant of, preconceptions and misconceptions to address, safety issues to address, how to include a math component,
To begin the lesson, they played a game called “Guess who makes that sound?”. This game included the teacher playing various sounds of different species of frogs without showing the student the video. The students were then supposed to guess the type of animal making the sound, many guessing crickets and rarely guessing frog. The teacher then showed them the video part to connect the call to the frog, which created a discussion about how frogs make sound and if all frog calls sound the same. Throughout the lesson the students use a KLEWS chart (K for know, L for Learn, E for evidence, W for wonderings, and S for Scientific Principle). During this part of the lesson they write what they know about frogs and frogs’ calls in the K or Know column, included in this column was that frogs are near a pond or a lake. From this discussion they added information to the L-Learning column as well. They next thought about what they had questions about and place them in the w-wondering column. They did this in groups of four to together find out questions they have. Questions that arose were “Do you think frogs are really talking to each other?” and “What are the frogs saying to each other?” (Lee & Lubischer,