With the full implementation of K to 12 curriculum here in the Philippines, I can say that the lessons and activities of students are more advanced compared to the previous curriculum. The Department of Education is also implementing a new grading system. My friend who teaches in a public elementary school said that student’s performance is being computed based on written work, performance tasks, and quarterly assessment. More weight is given to performance tasks which include individual / team activities, projects and participation to classroom / school activities or programs. Am i right, dear teacher friends? If you are reading this, feel free to comment about the new grading system… Thanks!
Let’s take the case of my daughter Thea who is in Grade 4. Her Science teacher assigned them to prepare and maintain a terrarium as part of the Performance Task for 2nd Quarter up to the 4th Quarter of this school year. Terrarium is a tiny enclosed ecosystem that is easy to maintain and a great option for home decor.
It’s an individual project that, according to the instruction, will be checked regularly. So, we helped Thea prepare her Science Project. We bought a small fish bowl, 2 miniature plants and pebbles. I searched the net to get ideas on how the terrarium will look like. These are the examples of terrarium I found:
credits to the owner of the photo
We followed the teacher’s instruction in making a terrarium. It goes like this:
- Prepare a clean glass jar or container
- Arrange the pebbles at the bottom of the jar
- Then, put the loam soil
- Add the plants
- Add earthworms
Here is the finished project:
Unfortunately, we only put 1 earthworm which could be one of the reasons why Thea did not get the perfect score during the “first” inspection of the terrarium projects.
We have to maintain this tiny ecosystem so that Thea will get high score on the next checking which will be on January 2016, if I’m not mistaken.