So with all of the various dead plant parts, along with soil from outside and water (from both Lake MI and the Chicago River), students are setting up their dead stuff jars to see what happens when we control all the variables except one! We've got experiments going on in the light, the dark, the heat, the fridge, the natural light, the artificial light, in lake water, in no water, in river water, in soil, not in soil.... You name it, we've got it going on in our classroom! We agreed to use the scale to measure if anything gets in or out...! YAY 5th Grade! |
After some careful thought, we're realizing that each of our Dead Stuff Columns, while setup to answer one question, may actually have lots of things going on in it which can affect the answers to our questions.
For example, the group that is investigating how heat affects the dead plants is also near the fan and the light. This means that their experiment isn't really figuring out if heat is affecting the dead plants, but light and wind may be, too. Just like the one in the fridge is meant to see what happens in the cold, but it's dark in the fridge, too. We decided we should try and set up some fair tests to see if we can pinpoint what is specifically causing anything to happen to the dead plants. While our 2L pop bottles were a great idea to model the real world outside, putting holes in them to allow for air flow for our living organisms may mean that other small things like dust and microorganisms get inside. This would mean we might be introducing another possible agent for change. Mrs. Brinza has a whole bunch of jars laying around, so we figured that they would be good containers to hold a plant part and to change just ONE possible cause. We spent today developing some fair tests...or what we thought were fair tests to answer our questions. Here's some student work! We'll be evaluating our work on Monday to see if our investigations get the green light of approval! If we're going to answer any of the questions about what happens to dead plants and how the different conditions a dead thing finds itself in effects it, we're going to have to record some data! Students agreed to drawing and writing about the changes (if any) they see to the investigations they set up. They moved them from the locations they established based on their questions (i.e. under the light, by the window, in the fridge, by the fan, in the heating pad, etc.) to their tables so everyone could get a good view! Students also agreed that their ability to accurately draw everything that's going on in their dead stuff columns might be a challenge. So we agreed to take pictures, and we worked out the kinks today with our Chromebooks using Google Drive to store them in a specific folder and rename with the date they were taken. We also did a bit of reflecting upon our work thus far, and we're beginning to think there are some limitations to our dead stuff columns. Here's some student thinking...
We spent time setting up the locations for where we could put all the "Dead Stuff Columns" knowing that Mrs. Brinza teaches 6th graders in and out of the classroom, too. We've got models in the closet, on the counter, in the windowsill, and even in the fridge. We've got some under a light, and others with heating pads on them. We've even got two under the table with a fan on them!
We agreed that we'll need to collect data on our models and we'll be recording this data over the next few weeks. Here's to hoping that we figure out the answers to some of our questions! We agreed that to investigate our questions, we needed to see what happens to plants when they've died. We also agreed that animals might be eating dead plants, so we figured they would be an important part of our models, too. Students brought in all kinds of dead plants (including many of their parts), soil, rocks, and even living organisms like crickets, earthworms, and meal worms. (Only one cricket managed to escape, ha!)
We spent the class period building our models, which we are now called "Dead Stuff Columns" because there's lots of dead stuff in them! Each group agreed to how they would set up their columns to help answer some of the questions on the Driving Question Board. Different setups include changing: temperature, wetness, ground cover, trash, amount of plants, and more! We'll be figuring out exactly HOW to setup these different conditions in our classroom along with the best ways to collect the evidence we need to answer all our questions! After we answered a whole bunch of our questions, we decided it was time to revisit the DQB and see the next set of questions we investigate. So we organized the questions into sub-groups and found we had lots of questions around: 1. Plants 2. Environmental factors affecting how something "disappears" 3. Organisms and what they eat Questions about people's involvement, bones, and other miscellaneous things can wait! We agreed that the questions about plants, environmental questions and organisms' eating habit might best be answered by going outside and seeing these things in action, but we also figured out that that might be really hard. We'd have to go outside a lot, and while that would be fantastic to do, it might be a bit challenging for many reasons. So...some students suggest we build some models to mimic the outside and see if we could gather evidence to answer some of our questions. Mrs. Brinza had a whole bunch of 2L bottles lying around (science teachers collect A LOT of stuff), and we agreed this would help up build some models that could answer some of our questions. Since they are transparent, we can easily see what's going on inside them. We first discussed what might need to go into these models to answer our questions, and we came up with these ideas: So while groups are figuring out what they want their model to represent, along with the questions they want to answer, we built the base layers of the models today. We did agree that we should try to build as many types of models to figure out as many answers as possible...thinking about temperature, moisture, surface, wind, living/dead organisms, and what eats what.
Students walked into class today and were asked the following question: Does the body of a dead organism disappear, or go somewhere else? Here is their take on the question! We also revisited our Driving Question Board and decided it was time to take everything we learned and see if we could answer some of the questions we asked...and we sure could! Students visited the DQB, took off a question they felt they could answer, brought it back to their groups and discussed whether they could answer it. If they agreed they could with the evidence they had gathered, then they answered it!
We sat in a scientists' circle and shared out our thinking to the questions, and realized some of them still didn't have complete answers to some of them, so we put them back up on the DQB. We also realized we had new questions, so we added those, too! Mrs. Brinza posted all the answers to the DQB and began to organize the remaining questions. This will help us think about which questions we should tackle next!
We'll be going back to our DQB next week to see if we can answer some of the questions we asked about the raccoon and the badger last week. W e'll also be trying to figure out how we can possibly answer some of the other questions we were wondering about!
After sharing many of our ideas, we established consensus on what the relationship is between the fly and all the white, wiggly critters! The fly lays her eggs (which we often can't see) and they hatch from their eggs as larvae. Over time, as the larvae eat and eat, they become bigger, and through a special process involving a cocoon, emerge as the adult fly. We're trying to expand our thinking into creating a mathematical model to show the relationship between the fly's weight and the eggs she lays. Here is our initial thinking on developing a mathematical model...I am super impressed! And here are some revised models, after discussing what each one was trying to represent! Fifth grade, you're really thinking!
So even though we couldn't bring meat (and maybe flies) into the classroom, we watched the video to help us better understand the role the flies had with the meat. Trying to connect the flies we saw at the beginning and the white, wiggly things at the ends was certainly tough. Here's a summary of what the class thinks:
Almost everyone wanted to zoom in on the movie more, but it didn't quite work. So Mrs. Brinza found another movie where someone was lucky enough to zoom in really close to a fly on meat.
We made some notice/wonder charts to organize our thinking...
And are developing some initial models to describe the relationships between the two organisms...
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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
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