This week has been an exciting one! We created and ran our insect experiments on Monday and Tuesday. It was really great to see all of the students' hard work and planning come to fruition. I wanted to share with you the steps that we went through in order to create an interesting/ successful experiment. The goal is to encourage the student to start asking questions about the world around them, form hypothesis from these questions, and then create an experiment that tests their hypothesis. This can take a little bit of guidance, as it is sometimes very difficult for the student to come up with a question that is in fact "testable." Step one: Student creates a list of questions about an insect or other topic. This list should include all the questions that they have, even if you know as a teacher that the question would not lead to a feasible experiment. Step two: Discuss the different questions, and have the student pick 2-3 that they are most interested in. Step three: Introduce these experiment sentence frames. This is the key to having the question be one that is "testable." Not all questions lead to a feasible experiment, but if it can be reformed to fit into one of these sentence frames, it usually leads to some pretty great experiments. Sentence Frames: 1.) Will more ________ (type of insect) go to the ________ or the _______? 2.) Do __________ (type of insect) prefer________ or_______? 3.) Are __________ (type of insect) attracted to _________? These sentence frames force the question to become one that is in fact testable. For instance, one child might ask "what does a cricket like to eat?" That is a very difficult question to form an experiment with. Whereas, if he/she re-frames that question to be "Will more crickets go to the fruit or the bread?" there is an entry point to a hypothesis and creation of an experiment. Step three: Form a hypothesis. Have the student think about the question and come up with a prediction.. The hypothesis should be an answer to the question that was asked. For example: More crickets will go to the fruit than the bread. Step four: Create experiment steps. I had them do a few drafts, because the steps tend to change a bit as the student starts to create the experiment. Have them do a rough draft so that they can think through what needs to happen. Then they will edit as they actually do the experiment and find that they need to change certain aspects of the set up. And finally, a final draft. We have been talking a lot about how a big part of being a scientist is that other people need to be able to recreate your experiment. It is a great chance to have students work on writing precisely what they mean. Here is the template that they used to create their rough draft: I hope you find this helpful in creating your own experiments with your student at home! I will be covering data collection, analysis, and drawing conclusions next week!
Announcements: We will be celebrating Valentine's Day on Thursday( February 13th) and Tuesday (February 18th). If your child brings cards, make sure there is one for every class member (I emailed you a class list). Also, no food/ candy etc. Website worth checking out: http://www.newsela.com/ This website has tons of articles that can be adapted to fit your student's reading level. Click on an article, and along the right hand side is a blue bar that has the lexile level. When you click on the different levels, the article changes to reflect that lexile level. The lowest that it goes is a 3rd grade level, but this is a lot closer than most current event articles. Pretty cool! Hope you are staying healthy and happy! Let me know if you have any questions about anything! Robin Comments are closed.
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AuthorWelcome to Robin's Core 2 Blog! Archives
February 2017
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