This got us wondering if maybe he didn't run his experiments long enough. Mrs. Brinza's going to make a call tonight to see if he ran the experiments longer and get us data over a longer period of time. Stay tuned!
We agreed that the best way to figure out how a plant gets the matter it needs to grow is to actually grow plants and see what happens to them in different conditions. We had quite a lengthy discussion about what this would look like...but in order to do that, we developed some initial models to explain how plants get the matter they need to grow. There is some argument about what they specifically need, so many experiments will help with this. We also know that watching a plant grow in our own classroom can be painfully slow, so we're thankful for our researcher scientist friend (a connection with Mrs. Brinza) who runs plant experiments all the time. We're using his data while we wait to design our own plant investigations. From all his data, we made the following claims after he recorded the intial weight and again after four weeks: There was some fairly alarming things we noticed from his data. The plants TOTALLY grew in the dark! This was really interesting to us since most of us thought that plants need light to grow. The data we saw suggested otherwise...that plants don't need light to grow, and they certainly don't need soil to grow.
This got us wondering if maybe he didn't run his experiments long enough. Mrs. Brinza's going to make a call tonight to see if he ran the experiments longer and get us data over a longer period of time. Stay tuned!
We're not really sure what they use to grow taller and we're certainly not in agreement...even after students shared their ideas about their own growing plants experiences. We think they need water for sure, but we're not convinced plants need soil or air. Some classmates claim they have plants that grow with just air (called air plants) and no water, and others think they need just water. Whoah--do we have some things to figure out!
Mrs. Brinza also found some plant videos that seem to help us better understand what plants might use for the matter they use to grow. But some of these videos made us wonder some more things...
All these videos got us noticing and wondering some interesting things as they relate to plant growth and where they get the matter to grow!
After figuring out that dead stuff gets consumed by different organisms (including us!), we went back to the raccoon that started this whole unit. We figured out that the adult raccoon that died was probably a baby once (ok, it really was a baby at one time) and that it consumed matter to grow into the adult. If everything is consuming something, then the raccoon had to consume something once, too! We did some research to figure out what exactly a raccoon consumes to grow bigger, grow more fur, make offspring, etc., and figured out it would be a good idea to model this, and here were our original ideas... Using the criteria we set forth and looking at different models, we decided that our scientific model to explain how a raccoon grows should be simple, and we established consensus to look like the picture below. We also figured it was time to official "talk" like scientists, and use words to describe what each of these organisms are: When it was all said and done, we were like, "What do the plants eat?" They were lonely with no arrows going into them...so how do they actually get the matter they need to grow? Because they grow, right?
We've got a whole bunch of ideas...but there's lots of arguing. We've got ideas that plants need water, air, sunlight, and soil, but not everyone thinks that all types of plants need all of these things. Looks like we'll have to be doing something with plants in order to fiture out where plants get the matter they need to grow! We haven't visited the DQB (Why do dead things disappear over time?) in awhile, so we spent the last few minutes of class doing the following: 1. Sending each group's manager up to the DQB to pull off a question they believe we can now answer. 2. Check with their group that it can be answered! 3. Answer the question on colored paper! 4. Repeat the process until all questions that could possibly be answered were answered. 5. Complete a gallery-walk to see all the questions that could be answered, along with any evidence/new questions that were generated. Here's our updated Driving Question Board: And some close-ups of student responses to questions they asked!
So while we all agreed that the mold was consuming the dead fruit in some of our jars (the mold was obviously getting larger while the strawberries were getting smaller), we still weren't entirely convinced about gathering enough concrete evidence about using weight as proof. So we wondered, "What else consumes dead stuff? That we could weigh?" US! So with some bananas in hand and a scale available, we did some eating and weighing... Our results were pretty interesting and not what we expected. Out of the ten students weighed between the two classes, only three actually gained the weight of the banana that they ate. We had a pretty good discussion about why this was the case; most likely due to a faulty scale. We also discussed the importance of a large sample size, because if we had only taken the measurements of say one student, and that student happened to be the one who lost weight, we wouldn't have any data to support our claim that eating make you gain weight and that the weight of the thing being eaten goes down.
From this we've realized a lot...and that there's three big ideas that have surfaced. 1. The living organism that eats gets bigger as it consumes dead stuff. It's weight increases and the amount of matter in it gets larger. 2. The dead organism that is being eaten gets smaller and its weight decreases. It's matter goes into the organism that is consuming it. 3. Altogether, the amount of matter stays the same in the system...it just gets rearranged. For example, the dead badger's matter goes into the larger, the dead plants matter goes into the worm or the mold, and the eggs' weight a female fly lays gets larger as she lays them. The total matter of all these things stays constant, and just moves from organism to organism.
After figuring out the relationship between the worms and the dead plant parts in our Dead Stuff Columns (it totally makes sense now why so many of our columns are looking like dark soil and not the vibrant colors we saw in the beginning), we've noticed that lots of groups are starting to have this fuzzy stuff appear seemingly out of nowhere. Here's what we noticed about the "fuzzy stuff:"
1. It appears to be getting bigger. 2. It is located on the dead stuff columns and jars that are damp or wet. There's really no fuzzy stuff on the investigations that were going on under the heat lamp or in the fan. 3. The fuzzy stuff is all kids of colors--we saw grey, white, blue, green, and even some pink fuzzy stuff. This made us wonder..."What is that fuzzy stuff and what is it doing?"
So after some students claimed it was mold, we agreed that we needed to research. We found a couple good sources of information and some great videos to show the relationship between the fuzzy stuff and the dead plants!
We figured out some pretty interesting things. First off, the fuzzy stuff was indeed mold, and that mold is a living thing! It's not an animal or a plant, but a type of fungus. It comes in a variety of colors and needs moisture to survive. It has spores which allow it to reproduce, and when they land on a food source, they begin to consume it. All this explains why some of our dead stuff columns and jars got moldy and some didn't, and it also explains why we saw different kinds of mold appear and why our fruits began to shrink!
Of course we needed to develop some models to explain this, and a student couldn't have said it better when she said, "Hey--this is just like the badger and the larvae and the worms and the dead plants!"
We also revisited our dead stuff jars and made sense of why the weight in our jars didn't change, even though mold began growing in some of them. Students recognized that as the mold grew, the fruits they put in the jars got smaller, showing nothing was really disappearing, but rather just "changing places" as someone put it.
We're still not certainly convinced of all this, and not everyone saw mold appear. So we agreed that maybe we can figure some more things out if we use another organism that eats dead stuff. Who could that be? US! As we're trying to figure out what happens to dead plants (as it relates to what happens to dead animals--maybe?), our home gardener helped us figure out a lot of stuff! There is certainly a relationship between dead plants, worms, and the castings they create (a.k.a. worm poop). Students developed models to showcase their thinking, and we're extending this into thinking about how we can represent this mathematically, too!
So we all agreed that the plants in our dead stuff columns were disappearing. We figured that figuring that out would be our best bet! After watching a video of a home gardener (who puts LOTS of fruit and vegetable "scraps" into a bucket with worms), we noticed a lot of stuff! We'll be building some models tomorrow to help explain everything that's going on and to help us figure out just what is happening to all our dead plant parts. Are they really disappearing? Or just going somewhere else?
Our dead stuff columns and jars are in full swing! We're collecting lots of data on them, drawing our observations, taking pictures, and even recording the weight of our jars (since they're a closed system). Each class spent time looking at what they noticed and wondered from their models and experiments to help us determine our next steps. There was lots of discussion about stuff disappearing and wondering where it went. We agreed that no one was tampering with our systems, and we think that the stuff might still be in our dead stuff columns and jars, but we're still not really sure.
We can't see things like fruits, petals, and some flowers, so our next steps are going to involve what's really happening to these things! Wait. What is happening? The colors are all changing. All this fuzzy stuff is appearing. Some of our organisms we put inside (worms, mealworms, and crickets) are getting bigger. Some have died. Some we can't see. We even see some new organisms like tiny worms appearing. A couple group's have even seen new things growing! Most of the columns don't have the bright colors of green leaves and bright reds, yellows and blues of the flowers and fruits we put inside. We see lots of brown, gray and black. Hmmmm..... So many new things to notice and wonder!
|
Mrs. BrinzaFifth graders in one of the two sections I teach are currently participating in research through the Next Generation Science Storylines Project! We are excited to be on this journey to share in science education! Archives
May 2018
Categories |