Gretchen Brinza
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The Dead Badger

2/21/2020

 
Picture
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!
This also meant we had to come up with some new investigation ideas centered around ideas that had just surfaced:  bugs visiting the dead badger and plants!
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!

5th Grade (class #1)

5th Grade (class #2)


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    Have you ever seen something like the dead raccoon above?  Did it disappear?  

     

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