This week was a tough one. In light of the COVID-19 school closure, our "figuring out" has turned into a remote, e-learning experience.  I am completely aware of the access and equity issues this is presenting, and while I am trying to continue on with our Dead Raccoon unit and everything we set out to figure out, I have mixed emotions that not all of my students are having an equitable experience.

I will continue to blog here with what we're doing in hopes that those students who don't have access to what is happening over an online platform can return here to this space and see what we've done.  Again, not ideal at all, but I can't think of any other way to do this knowing there are many hurdles in the way right now.

After agreeing to document the changes in our dead plants columns, we are starting to see some amazing things happening!

When we sat in a scientist circle and tried to explain the causes for each of the changes in our columns, we started to realize that too many factors, or variables, could be causing the changes. This also opened up a slew of new questions regarding worms, mold, and plant growth, which we will need to address later  (we added new investigation ideas like research and new plant investigations).  

For this reason, we decided to run new investigations testing only ONE variable at a time. This way, we could pinpoint if that particular variable was making any change.  We agreed not to test this with worms, as that wouldn't be kind to put them into closed containers without access to air.  But we also had the idea to record the weight of the jars to gather any mathematical evidence for changes.  

We're testing the following variables:
1.  Size
2.  Squished
3. Soil
4. Sand
5.  Skin
6. Water
7. Heat
8. Cold
9. Light
​10. Dark

We've already got data in after just one day, and we're noticing the appearing of things yet the weight in the containers is remaining unchanged (or 0.1 gram b/c our scales may experiencing rounding errors).  This is super interesting to us that mold can appear on our plant parts yet the weight stays the same...

So our first stop was with the bugs that visited the badger. We've recognized that they were the first organism to visit the dead animal, and after zooming in on some dead meat pictures (no, Mrs. Brinza didn't bring in any dead animals to school), we've began making some connections!

Our timelapsed meat pictures (from outside, just like the badger) weren't good enough.  So we wanted to zoom in on them, and here's what we found!

Putting two and two together (and a lot of talk about flies), we decided to build out our thinking about how flies, eggs, and little white things are connected!

We built out our consensus model and are agreeing on a few things:

1.  The white things we see on the dead meat are maggots/larvae. They are consuming the meat.
2. When the fly lays her eggs, her weight goes down. The eggs hatch, and the larvae that come out begin eating, which makes them larger.

All this fly talk and "getting bigger" and "getting smaller" talk is making us think that we can represent what's going on in a different way, like mathematically!  So we used some Lego to build out our thinking...and then tried it ourselves with other mathematical avenues.  We're on to some incredible, new models to represent what's happening scientifically AND mathematically!

So although students wanted to BRING IN A DEAD ANIMAL and observe it over time to figure out what happens to the dead raccoon, we discussed how Mrs. Brinza wanted to keep her job and swayed students against this!  The good news is, however, that someone else has documented what happened to a similar organism (a badger) and we felt this would be a good substitution!

We built out new models to realize that some of our initial predictions might be incorrect, so we shared out these new models with our tables!  We've narrowed down our causes to be:

1. Decay/decomposition (whatever those things are)
2.  Bugs
3. The weather (sun/rain/wind possibly)
4. A  disease
5.  Various animals visiting it and eating it
6.  Bird consuming it
8.  Plants using it to grow

We also discussed how there may be other things that die, and our conversation centered around plants!  We're thinking that plants possibly disappear in some of the similar ways to animals, and added to our related phenomena lists!

We also realized we hadn't publicly documented any of our questions, and decided to build out our Driving Question Board! Boy, do we have a lot of questions surrounding the raccoon and badger, our related phenomena lists focused on animals/plants and the environments they're in, and the models we've developed thus far!  We've got a lot to figure out for sure!

So one day last fall, Mrs. Brinza was driving and saw a really interesting thing on the side of the road...

A dead raccoon!

So after asking students to make some observations and generate some questions about the raccoon, here's what they came up with:

With all this talk, we started thinking about what would happen to the raccoon over time, and students developed some initial models:

And then we began to share out our ideas with one another, and ultimately the whole class.  

We quickly realized we have a whole lot we don't agree on, so we began thinking of investigations we can do in our class to help us figure out what would happen to this dead raccoon over time.  Not sure we can bring a dead animal into class or find one over the weekend...ha!