During the next three months, I will be working with the 3rd and 4th graders. Students will be learning about vernal pools, conducting an experiment, and writing a children's book.
During the first three weeks, we have talked about some basic concepts - including a description of the three vernal pool phases, and a brief introduction to organisms that are found in these temporary wetlands. Each kid has a science folder with all the material that we have been using in science class. Please feel free to take a look at your kid's work if you are interested in learning more about what we have been doing in class.
Next week we will start our experiment, so today we spent some time talking about "what scientists do". We started with a brief discussion summarizing what the kids already knew about how scientists approach questions, and then we conducted a simple experiment to help the kids visualize the steps of the scientific method.
We started by making observations of raisins and sprite (any clear carbonated drink would work for that). The question we were interested in answering was what would happen to the raisins once they were dropped into a cup of sprite. Each kid had to develop their own hypothesis, write or draw how they were going to conduct their experiment, conduct the experiment, interpret and present their results.
