Blog Post 2

What did you learn this week?

This week I learned about the eight different characteristics of living things. These eight characteristics included cellular composition, genetics and heredity, maintains homeostasis, growth and change, movement, responds to stimuli, metabolism, and reproduction. I also learned that a virus is not a living thing because it has no cells and no metabolic processes. 

Are you able to relate what you learned to what you already know? 

Yes, I am able to relate what we learned about the characteristics of living things to what I already know because I already knew what these concepts meant to me, and how they relate to different things outside of the classroom, but this just built on my specific knowledge about all of them and provided me with a more clear definition. 

How can you apply what you learned to your teaching in the future?

I really liked the making the visual posters with our group after learning about the eight characteristics. I would like to use this idea in my future classroom because it helps students come up with a visual associated with the term and then help visualize all the different characteristics so the words have more meaning to them and is more beneficial for their understanding, especially for students who are visual learners.