In an effort to educate others about all our learning in our Roadkill Unit, we decided to make a picture book (available for online viewing)!  In our water unit, we decided to make posters to educate others, so we found this decision very fitting!

Students have intensively learned how to use Google Drawing this year, and we decided to put it to good use.  Students designed all the characters, and then worked as collaborative tables to write and edit one page of the story.  We hope you enjoy them!

So once we figured out that we COULD possibly connect this plant growth phenomenon back to the anchoring phenomenon of the dead raccoon, we set off to work!  Using all the organisms we figured something out about throughout our study, we connected them together from what we had learned from a both a matter and energy perspective.  Here are the two classes' final models!

It was surely a heavy lift as a class to create, discuss, and improve our work over two days.  But at the end of it, students felt super successful at what they accomplished!

We're going back to the Driving Question Board one more time to see if there are any questions that we left that we can either now answer, or research the answers to.  Way to go 5th grade! We've got some questions about odors, what flies and birds eat, and  what rot is exactly! 

After looking at each group's revised model of how plants grow, we had a lot to reflect upon.  So we sat in a scientists' circle and students recognized that they were certainly critical of others (and maybe we're the most keen on getting feedback from others they admitted).

So we set off to see how we could best represent this "plant growth" phenomenon, and decided the best way to show plant growth was with two plants--a before and an after.

We had an interesting conversation about what was really happening with the air and water as the plant was using it to grow.  We figured out that as the plant was getting bigger, the air and water would have to be getting smaller.  Ultimately (and somehow in a process we don't really get yet in 5th grade), the air and water become a taller plant or a new plant part.  Of course, this only happens when light energy is present.  

Mrs. Brinza found some pom-poms, and we built a physical model to show this:

We agreed that it was time to connect all the stuff we figured out back to the anchoring phenomenon for our unit--the dead raccoon!  Students suggested we revise our model yet again, to show what happens to the raccoon and answer our Driving Question for the Unit, "Why do dead things disappear?"

So after looking at all our initial models and looking for similarities and differences between models, we set off to revise our initial thinking based on the evidence we've gathered so far.  Students established the criteria for their revised models to be:

1.  Matter as pieces (air and water)
2.  Plant growth shown
3.  Light present (but not as pieces/particles, because it's energy, NOT matter)
4.  Simple, neat, and labeled, with an explanation of the phenomenon

Here are their models!

Since we figured out that matter and energy are different things, we decided to swing back around and make sense of what we figured out about how plants get their matter and how matter can be represented at a zoom-in level as particles!

Students developed initial models to explain where plants get the matter they need to grow (since we've figured out the difference between matter and energy, energy being the ability to get stuff to move, heat up, or be powered). 

​Here is a look at their initial models:

We completed a "silent gallery walk" where students offered critical feedback to their peers.  Here's a sampling of their feedback!  How thoughtful!

And from there, we discussed the similarities and differences of our models to revise them and work towards establishing consensus!