Jennifer

I have a table in my classroom where I put out items that I find interesting, such as:  shells, interesting seed pods, rocks, starfish, pictures, etc.  I also add new items to the table as I find them.  Often when I add new items, I will share them with the class and talk about how my curiosity prompted me to pick up the item and add it to the table.  I might also model what questions I have about the items.  As the year progresses, students also begin to bring in items to add to our table; they often want to stand up in front of the class and show their items (and of course, pass it around for everyone to observe or touch).  They might share what about the items peaked their curiosity or background knowledge they have about the item, for example, two years ago, a student found some cow teeth in the field.  He brought them in and shared them with the class.  As students observed the teeth, they (and I) of course had some questions about the teeth.  My main concern was about where the teeth had come from; I thought perhaps I was touching teeth that had come from a dead cow and that raised concerns about how the cow died.  My student, and later his father, explained to me and the class that cows will often lose teeth just like humans.  Without that table, I might never had found this out.  I would love to use the idea of I Wonder boards to encourage deeper observational and experimental questions with this idea of collecting items that catch our natural curiosity and cause us to wonder.  Before the items were merely for a quick activity that allowed my students and myself to share those "cool" things we found in the natural world.  Now I think it would be even better to make these things a part of our actual Science lessons.  We could choose to really observe some of these items and create experimental questions which we would hopefully be able to test out in our classroom.

Last year, our Science units were organized around an anchoring phenomenon, which took at natural phenomenon such as the Great Dust Bowl or a Mars Biosphere and asked students to complete a See Think Wonder Chart.  During the See portion of the lesson, students either watched a video, read an article, or look at a photograph in order to extend their understanding of the topic.  They first were asked to record what they saw (or use their power of observation), then they were asked to make inferences about what they saw in the think portion; finally, they were asked to write questions in the Wonder portion of the worksheet.  The idea was that students would refer back to their wonders throughout the unit to see if they were able to answer the wonders based on what we had learned during our labs, our learning, etc. The upside of this was that it really got students thinking more deeply about a topic.  There were, however, many downsides.  First, doing these charts and referring back to them throughout the unit was rather time consuming, so much so that as the year progressed, I found I couldn't complete all the required topics and eventually stopped using them.  Second, we really didn't go into any kind of instruction or discussion about what made a good question for science inquiry.  Third, since the units were already made (We used Mystery Science.), the students didn't really get to use their questions for scientific inquiry-the idea of wondering just felt like an activity tacked on to a unit just to say we had covered those parts of the NGSS.

I would like to include all three teaching practices in my teaching, but the one that aligns most closely with my passion is the idea of using CS to affect change within our communities.  During the weeks that my fifth grade students were engaged in virtual learning, we took part in a virtual field trip with UNC Wilmington's MarineQuest Science Lab and learned about plastic trash and its affects on sea turtles.  Kids were encouraged to pick up trash within their own communities.  I'm really passionate about the topic of marine trash but since my school is in Central New York, learning about marine trash doesn't seem to fit into our community.  I liked, however, how the program linked marine trash into picking up trash wherever you are.  We talked about waterway connectedness and the great likelihood that much plastic trash ends up in our waterway and can affect marine species.  I live in the Finger Lakes region and we could certainly tie something with water quality, trash, and marine species as a meaningful learning experience. I would love to find a CS program that would allow me to tie this passion into my classroom and community in a meaningful way.

During our Web of Life unit, we learn about several different types of decomposers:  mold, fungi, and worms. One inquiry based lesson that we complete as part of this unit is a lesson on Mold Terrariums.  For this lesson, I provide students with the question that they will be investigating:  Which environmental conditions inhibit or speed up mold growth.  I also provide students with the basic structure through which they will investigate this topic;  Students are put into groups; each group is given a paper plate, a Ziploc bag large enough to hold the plate, duct tape, and different types of foods (We used bread, banana slices, apple slices, orange slices, and a slice of American cheese).  To show students how to set up their investigation, I create the control for the class-I show them how to slice up and arrange the food on their plate; how to label the outside of their bag and how to insert the plate inside the Ziploc bag and use duct tape to seal the Ziploc bag to prevent air exchange as well as odor exchange.  As I do this, I explain that I will not be manipulating the environmental factors in any way, so that we can see how these food naturally mold.  I then explain to students that they will be manipulating one environmental factor to see whether it inhibits or encourages mold growth.  We discuss some possible environmental factors they could add to the food, for example, I mention salt-we then discuss how people have used salt for a long time to slow down the decomposition of their food, and we discuss why this works.  In the past, we've also discussed how heat and refrigeration might also slow down mold growth.  After students have a good idea of what we are doing, it time for them to brainstorm as a group several different (at least 4-5) environmental factors they can manipulate. I do provide some, such as red pepper flakes, salt, a refrigerator, the classroom heater, etc. which they can try, but I also allow students to come up with ideas on their own.  I will provide them with these materials as long as they are able to articulate why they want to use this material (whether they believe it will inhibit or quicken mold production) and why.  In the past, students have used glue (They felt it would create a barrier around the food and seal out air interchange, thus inhibiting mold growth), soap, maple syrup, spit/licking the food, putting it in the dark, and soap to name a few.  We then share out our lists of environmental factors that we want to change; I list those on the board, and each group chooses the environmental factor they would like to change.  Since I have only 4-5 groups in each of my classes, I do set a limitation on factors-only one group in each class can choose a factor.  It just helps up get a wider range of observations.  Students must then write in their journals what environmental factor they chose to change, predict whether it would inhibit or speed up mold growth, and explain their reasoning for this prediction.  They then set up the experiment just like I set up the control and make the one environmental factor change.  Each day for the next two weeks, they come into class, look at both the control and their Mold Terrarium and record their data.  They are recording the following data each day:  no mold, first mold, less than half, about half, more than half for each food in the terrariums.  After the two weeks they make comparisons of the control and their Mold Terrarium; they look back at their prediction and decide whether their prediction was correct or incorrect based on how soon the Control grew mold and theirs did.  They then have to write in their journals about their findings and why they believe their environmental factor performed as they predicted or why it did not.  This is where I stop the experiment.  In the future, I would really like to move it from Structured Inquiry into a more Guided or Open Inquiry, for example, many students noticed that certain foods grew mold faster (ie. bread) and certain foods grew mold slower (processed American cheese).  A great extension of this initial inquiry would be to come up with inquiry methods designed by students that would help them understand the idea of natural and processed food and what that does to mold growth.  I'm not sure how to do it right now but think it would be interesting to tie back in to the idea that chemicals, coloring, and many other things are added to food to increase its shelf life.  It would be interesting to see how my students go about investigating this and what conclusions they draw about the benefits of and healthfulness of highly processed foods.  This lesson was completed in a fifth grade classroom.