Whenever the blog goes silent you know there are some amazing things happening in science class and there's not even enough time to share the awesome.
Wanted to start the latest recap of the happenings in 4-5-6 Science by sharing some warm and fuzzies... As you may recall Lisa Nansteel, Vice President of Education for the St. Louis Audubon Society, and her team visited CDS last week to teach our Grade 5-6 students the basics of bird identification. She also worked with Grade 4 on classifying animals using binomial nomenclature. After her visit I received an email from her saying, "We enjoyed working with you and especially your students. It is not often we get to work with so many intelligent and well mannered children at one time!"
We know we have great students at CDS, but it's always nice to hear it from outside visitors too!
Grade 4 Science
Now that we have completed our initial investigations using the metric system we're ready to dive into our unifying theme of water! We began our studies by walking to The Lake on White Road in our neighboring subdivision. Before leaving for the lake the students calculated the distance of their walking pace in metric. Then they counted how many steps they each took on the hike to the lake. Below the students are seen recording their data on the way.
When we got back from the lake the students calculated their total steps taken, converted that number to meters, and then calculated that to miles. The lake ended up being about .6 miles away for those keeping score at home.
While at the lake we found this guy...
We also threw out a crayfish trap and let it soak for 24hrs. Here's the shot-by-shot results...
Bubkus! So far this year we're 0-2 with the crayfish trap (even with 24hr soaks!) I'm not too upset about it, because it's like I always tell the kids "ZERO is a result!" Hopefully, we'll have much better luck when we head to the creeks to do our macroinvertebrate collection in a couple of weeks.
We ended the week talking about how humans are made up of 60-70% water... but where exactly is that water? In our cells of course! Students looked at the cells in the inner layers of skin in onions using microscopes to conceptualize how water is stored in our bodies. They also learned valuable strategies for effective microscope use. The students recorded this information in their science notebooks by diagramming what they saw, describing what they saw, and then comparing and contrasting what they could see with their naked eye vs the microscope. It's great home support to ask your child to see their science notebook. Have them summarize what we are working on in class and ask them how they chose to organize their information and their thinking. Giving them feedback on their written explanations and descriptions goes a long way towards reinforcing what we are doing in the classroom.
NEXT WEEK: We will be going canoeing on Tuesday at Simpson Lake to learn water safety, basic paddling skills, and collecting abiotic data to perform chemical water quality testing.
While there are a lot less pictures to share this week with Grade 5 and 6, there was still a lot of learning going on... just not much in the way of photographs. We started off the week by finalizing our work around scatterplots and graphing. We reviewed variables and the essential elements of experimental design and then we assessed our progress on Tues/Wed. In science we don't like to call them assessments though... nor quizzes or tests... we call them "Celebrations of Learning!" because that's really what they are. A chance for the students to show off all the hard work they've been doing in preparation for this event!
On Thursday students had a chance to see their results and get feedback from our assessments and then began to dive into another thread that will run through the science curriculum for the next two years... Systems Thinking. Do me a favor and please ask your student about the Triangles activity (if they haven't already told you) and have them get out their science notebooks and explain to you what all systems have in common. It will be great for the kids to review this material and you'll probably get a good story out of it!
On Friday we ended the week by learning how to look for patterns and trends in a system using Behavior Over Time Graphs (BOTGs). We will continue this work on Monday and then the students will read the book Seedfolks while I am on expedition with Grade 6 to Camp Ondessonk. While they read the book they will be creating BOTGs and using systems thinking tools to explore the interconnections of interdependencies of the characters in the book. This will also serve as an inspirational tool for our Green Schools Quest project.
Kyle and Aiden are seen enjoying life as expert graph makers
Enjoy the weekend!
PS - Anyone else riding in Pedal the Cause? I'll be doing the 50-mile ride on Sunday to support one of my former students who has been battling a tumor on his brain stem for the last 6 years. Go Team Issa!
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