Back on board.

I have decided to come back to my blog after quite a while away from it beign busy having another child. My delicious daughter is now a year old and I am so fortunate to be at home caring for her rather than having her in care.

We share two lovely quiet week days each week together and three energetic creative days with her three year old brother home also.
He is becoming so interested in the world and I am enjoying introducing Science to him in little snippets. He asks wonderful questions and as a result of him asking me why plants grow we have been growing some bean seeds in a clear soda bottle.
We have been documenting the changes we see in the free version of the Educreations app and discussing changes we see each day.
Funnily enough I didn't notice that before the bean seeds germinate they grow bigger and softer from absorbing the water into the seeds.

Mr Three has loved seeing how much change there is under the soil before the seedlings appear.


 We make our daily observations and he lets me know what he thinks will happen next. At three and a half he really is excited to see the changes taking place.
Today we were amazed to see that our little bean plant leaves had turned back towards the window within 2 hours of being rotated away from the sun.

We also grew some bean seeds in cotton wool and kept them on the window sill just to see what would happen. A little bit of slow germination and then a fizzle. They did nothing. This was enough to cement it for Mr Three that the seeds in the cotton wool did not survive because they did not have food, just water, sun and air.

This has made me think about a product I have been working on, a quiz for Science. In the making of this quiz I have been looking at each of the standards in the American curriculum. One of the fifth grade standards states that "...plant matter comes mostly from air and water, not from soil." "Students should understand that plants require air and water to grow only. That they are not dependent on soil or sun".
This to me is alien to both what I have seen through planting seeds and read. When we teach the basic needs of all living things, students learn that plants need air, water, food and space to grow. Specifically though too plants take in carbon monoxide so this further confuses me. I will have to further investigate what the standards are meant to convey.

But hey, what about that other side of science; Design and Make.

While reading over my posts and other things I have put together today, I realised I have barely touched on another side of teaching science and technology that is the Design and Make process.

This can be a very intimidating process for teachers to undertake with their students, not only because they feel that the sourcing and organisation of resources can be a major pain, but also that design and make tasks can be messy.

Well we can't do much about the mess except reinforce with our students that if they don't clean up after themselves they won't be able to do the work. Ensuring we leave enough time in a lesson to clean up and develop a clean up routine such as allocating two students to only focus on cleaning up one particular thing. They touch nothing else and if you allocate enough of those pairs of students, pretty soon your class will be cleaner than before you began.

Now for resources; When I began teaching science in my classroom I soon realised that I was going to need a lot of resources. As I was often teaching the same lessons to a whole stage I needed 120 of something at a time. So I had to collect, use things that were free and change my thinking. What was rubbish to me and my parent community could be a perfect design and make resource for my students.

So what did I collect:

«  take away food containers - great for storing students bits and pieces while a work is in progress. Great for mixed paint too.

«  bread bag tags 

«  plastic and metal bottle lids - milk bottle, glue lids, beer bottle tops,

«  snap lock bags

«  elastic bands

«  corks

«  paper clips

«  bread bags

«  paper towel rolls and toilet rolls (if your school allows)

«  dry pasta

«  used cds

«  used wrapping paper and scraps of material

«  ribbons

«  cardboard tubes that are on dry cleaners hangers

«  tissue and match boxes

«  paddle pop sticks and balloons

«  fruit netting bags

Your parent community may also work in places where there are offcuts or items that are regularly thrown away, but could be used by your students. Ask as you will never know what you will receive.
My general rule of thumb when collecting resources was; just because I can't imagine what the kids will do with it, doesn't mean it isn't useful.
Don't limit your students to your imagination and have fun with them. Often my lesson would consist of me sitting with a stanley knife cutting pipes, bending wires or cutting foam into the shapes my students wanted so they could turn them into fantastic new objects.
Lastly a word for the neat freak teachers out there; let go and enjoy your students using their creativity in a new way.

Jenni

Learning to teach science well

Day one of kindergarten science class and I ask my students what they believe science is? 
Every year the response was the same; 'We will blow things up and make potions'. 
The image kids have in their mind seems to have come in part from tv, movies and books, but some kids really love science and read about it with their parents or do experiments on the weekend. They understand that there is so much more to science and that it is such a vastly wide subject. There is bound to be a theme they are enthused about although it may not mean they like every science lesson. 
Either way, they are usually keen. Bright eyed and eager to know; 'What will we be learning about this term?'


I have seen many young students enthusiastic for their school science education, only to become disillusioned and unenthralled by the lessons delivered. Bored with worksheets, fact sheets on inventors and videos, they wanted to get their hands dirty, make something fly or test something. They wanted to create, to work in groups, and 'do stuff' but mostly to not have to sit and write or be talked to. Of course, most units of work have some element of this, but for some this is all they experience. 
I believe that for some elementary school teachers, teaching science can seem intimidating. It requires the teacher to not only teach in a different way, to use and organise a lot of resources, but for the teacher to let go of the control of a highly structured class and accept some temporary mess and let their students move around.


Once I was able to overcome this, I found teaching science fun and of course the students enjoyed it more. I learned to expect the unexpected from them and let their imaginations and creativity run wild.

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