Stimulating Science Simulations

Today was spent with a wonderful group of educators from Bladen County Schools.  We took a good hard look at how teachers can bridge student learning and standardized assessment expectations while managing inquiry based learning experiences.  If you were a part of this experience, I hope you gained some valuable information and would love to hear from you.  Please feel free to comment on this post and share what part of the day was most meaningful to you.  Come back from time to time.  Teachers helping other teachers is a critical piece to our growth as professionals.  Let's learn from each other so that our students can have the benefit of an abundance of ideas, knowledge, and practice. Now, go "DO" some science and get those kids engaged!

I am hosting my first webinar tomorrow night @ 8 pm EST. Please join in as we talk about the best ways to teach elementary science.

I've participated in tweetchats and webinars.  Now I'm branching out as a moderator.  Moderating a tweetchat was easier than I thought it would be. In my application for the Burroughs Wellcome career award, I mentioned the use of webinars to share knowledge and collaborate with other teachers.  Now that I have won the award, it's time to start utilizing them.  Consider this your formal invitation to join in on the adventure. I have scheduled a webinar for Aug. 12th @ 8 pm EST.  We'll chat about our best practices for teaching science to students in grades 3-5.  I'm hoping this will become the first of many wonderful collaborative opportunities.  The session will be recorded and placed in an archive if you miss it. Send me a PM if you have any questions. To sign up for the webinar you'll need to go to learncentral I'm pretty impressed that they offer this service for free.

Another great day today with John Fisher from LifeLab and 9 other teachers from CCS.  We started out by learning the best way to prep a bed for planting.  My thumb is feeling a little bit more green already!  Even though we got an early start, the humidity was tough to take.  What a great group of educators who stuck it out and planted 2 beds of cantaloupe, eggplant, and tomatoes.  Yes, we realize it is a little bit late to put these in the ground.  If I can keep them watered they might just hang in there long enough to bear some fruit.  Thank goodness for the long growing season of NC. While we were at the community garden, we found that our 2 fig trees were full of fruit that is getting close to being ready to pick.  What a great surprise! Later on, we dissected the soil and prepared paper pots for seedlings.  Who knew that a V8 can makes a great tool for creating a paper pot?!  Everyone left with ample seed packets to go out an...

If you've ever considered gardening with students, LifeLab.org is a great resource.  This week about 10 teachers in our district are spending time with one of the trainers from LifeLab and we've been learning lots already.  For example, today we made "the perfect compost pile."  At least I hope it will be.  Thanks to the Food Lion on Skibo Rd. we had about 9 banana boxes full of greens that had just been pulled from their produce selection in the store.  This was a great start.  I learned that in NC we say straw and many of us think pine straw, but when you are composting you want straw that is the stem of hay producers like wheat.  So much for the 2 bags of pine straw I had gathered for our pile.  Luckily we have Southern Gin and Seed Co. about 2 blocks away from the school and they had plenty of straw bales available. After lunch, Shauna Haslem (from the NC Coop. Ext.) shared with us some advice for fall and winter planting in NC.  T...

It's hard to believe that 3 weeks of science camp have come and gone.  What a great time we've had!  This week we wrapped up our learning with some investigations of force and motion, UV light and properties that make things glow or change color, bubbles, and density. Here are the highlights: We used nature paper to create shadow art and made bracelets with beads that change color in the sun.  We experimented with glow powder and atomic glow under a black light and compared the results to placing those materials in the sun light. We had a potato gun fight and learned about Newton's 3rd law of motion - "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." We simulated an oil spill in an "ocean" and students tested a variety of materials to be used for clean up.  Student suggestions were dish soap, baking soda, and the dehydrated gel powder that we had experimented with last week.  Then we tried out the oil absorbing polymer and sea sweep.  If ...

 It took us 2 days to get around to making our shoebox guitars but it was a great 2 days!  We built up our background knowledge about sound instead of jumping into the build.  To do this we made all kinds of sounds using balloons, palm pipes, and glass jars.  We got so good at it, we were even able to create some great music videos.   Finally, we understood enough about the effect of air traveling and sound waves bouncing that we were able to make predictions about how to best set up our shoebox guitars and everyone got busy.  Of course they had to purchase their supplies from Mrs. Kaiser first so they all made a trip to Beaker Bank.  After making our guitars, we experimented with the variables a bit.  In the end, we realized that the same exact rubberband positioned differently on the shoebox could produce a different pitch.  I think the kids were a bit surprised at the science behind the music. Of course we spent time in the garden ...