How to Teach the Moon Phases

A typical way to teach the moon phases, or the lunar cycle, is as follows. Students are meant to develop a model, then use it to describe these patterns. But in the plan i just described for you, students merely copied a model, and they didn't use it to description anything. Asking a person to develop amodel is a much higher order task than asking them to copy a model. Describing systems and patterns is a way more challenging than selecting the correct description.