Crystal

I find it helpful to review the student work as they go through the process, to make sure they do not get too off-track before they start the experiment and interpret the data. I do check-ins after they have their question and hypothesis, when they have designed their experiment and declared their variables, when they make their charts, and finally, after they have completed their finished project. These are not always on a rubric, sometimes I will just quickly ask, "tell me about your question" or "what data have you gathered so far?"

I researched the eBird site. It tracks citizen science sitings of birds to track where they are seen. There are many ways this data is sorted. Anyone has access to the eBird site, although to enter data, one must have an account. I could see students use this especially around bird migration. With data sets from around the world, eBird can show us where birds go and what distances they travel.

I did the FeederWatch citizen-science project. Overall, I felt that it was successful and a great learning experience. The challenges were that some days there were hardly any birds and other days there were so many it was quite distracting. I could see students getting engaged in this but how to work it into the schedule when the birds are not on a schedule could be tricky. Learning outcomes would be inquiry, chart making, data collection and predictions.

Since I live in a large city, I found the competition between natural and industrial noises to be interesting. So many sounds exist to get the attention of humans, such as car horns and ice cream trucks, while the birds and cicadas are trying to make themselves heard without us in mind at all.

I will focus on youth can do science, which is part of the larger idea of citizen science, which is that anyone can be a scientist. I plan to do this through student engagement in ebird and budburst.

I want to focus on the practice that youth are people who do science. I feel that many students see scientists as white men like Bill Nye and Einstein and that it's something only "really smart" people do. By engaging students in citizen science early on, hopefully this mindset will shift and a more diverse group of people will become scientists in the future. I plan to model this with students through doing a citizen science project like Feeder Watch and exposing them to the website iamascientist.org.

Inquiry is a natural process through which humans use curiosity to explore the natural or material world, though asking questions and making discoveries. Along the way, the enquirer is collecting and recording data, making inferences, applying new concepts, and consulting resources. I wasn't able to attach an image, but my map included curiosity, engagement, puzzling, solving, focus, scientific process, natural world, material world, and discovery.

This was my first time using the portable water brushes and I feel like I went a little too wet at times. I found that getting the details like the stripes on the belly and shading of the wings was hard with watercolor, but I'm glad I tried it. I certainly wouldn't have noticed how the claws grab around the branch but loosely in some parts and the shape of the beak. I tried so many times to make the beak look just right!