June 30

Sprouts and Vines

Well the irrigation has been installed and is hopefully keeping the pumpkins well hydrated. I guess the technical term is irrigated. We now have many plants coming up and adding more leaves to their stems. There was a distinct difference between the 2 gardens with germination.  Garden 1 had 29 of 32 seeds germinate, while Garden 2 had 21 of 33 seeds germinate.  Many students predicted that the sunlight was the key factor in germination rate.  What other factors could have played a role?

We may need to thin some soon. The teachers are checking in once in a while to make sure everything is growing well during the summer months.

Waiting for germination.

Waiting for germination.

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The first plant to germinate.

5th graders finished up the year well.  We worked hard to create a legacy crop that will be growing at the beginning of your 6th grade year.  Be sure to stop by to see how your hard work is paying off. Hopefully we have enough fruit to harvest for our 1st graders.

January 6

One thing that could have the greatest impact on your learning, and it’s as simple as dreaming.

Today I shared another video with the kids.  But before I embed it into this post, let’s remember the reason for sharing it.

  1. I wanted to have the class reflect on one factor that may play a significant role in their learning.

The video talks about what we’ve learned about sleep through the help of good science.  Some of it is very complicated, but it simplifies one thing in particular, how sleep is connected to learning.  If we don’t get good sleep, we struggle to help our bodies in a number of ways.  For example, we become more forgetful.  So, staying up all night to study for a test isn’t really helpful.  In fact, we’d be better off getting more sleep the night before a test, versus staying up late to study for it.

I asked kids what their optimal level (just right amount) of sleep would be and to share it with a friend.  Zaira said 8 hours.  It’s different for everyone, but typically, most people say they need 8 hours.  A young person generally needs more, like 10 hours because they’re growing.  Next, I asked kids to figure the amount of sleep they were able to get last night and share it with a neighbor.  Then, I asked to show me with their thumbs if they exceeded their optimum (thumbs up), maintained their optimum (thumbs sideways) and didn’t get their optimum (thumbs down).  Wow!  Most kids had their thumbs down.  Are we sleep deprived?  We would really need to investigate it more to know for sure.  Remember that good science would be based on more than one trial.

Here’s the video

I leave you with one question.  Are you willing to study your own sleep habits?

March 11

Variables

Recently our class began studying variables. We defined it as the following:

Variable-Anything you can change in an experiment that might affect the outcome.

This lead us to run some controlled experiments. First, we looked at a particular pendulum system. Students built them with a 38 cm string, a paper clip and a penny. Next, I asked kids… “How many swings will are pendulums complete in 15 seconds?” Kids made several predictions. The teams came up with mixed results that didn’t quite make sense. When I probed a bit further we found we needed to standardize our process for the investigation. Everybody has to follow the same steps.

Later, the class broke down the variables for the pendulums.

length of string
release height
mass (pennies)
pushing/pulling vs. dropping
type of string

This lead to more tests. We wondered…

How does release height affect the number of swings in 15 seconds?

How does mass affect the number of swings in 15 seconds?

We concluded that when we ran controlled experiments with the variables above, there was no significant change in the number of swings our pendulums completed. As a result, we looked back at the variable list and we made the decision to test swinger length. The videos below show the class experimenting. Some of the pendulums were so large we had to start them from a position near or on the ceiling!

Do you remember what we discovered? What was the trend we observed?