Oct28

Pumpkin Science

What’s happening in the early childhood world of Pumpkin Science? Have you planted and harvested pumpkins? Have you weighed, floated, cut-open, counted seeds, printed, or rolled pumpkins?

holding a pumpkin 

Share your pumpkin science lesson here! Add a comment by clicking on the word “comment” below.
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I have pumpkins, now I need some ideas!

Peggy

Published: Oct-28-09 | 3 Comments | 0 Links to this post

Aug29

Planting this fall for spring time blooms

I’m planning a fall gardening activity now, before school starts, and the first step is to mark my calendar to buy spring flowering bulbs before the end of September. Seasonal changes vary across the many climates in the United States. If you get temperatures below 40*F for extended periods of time, you can plant these bulbs too. If not, go to the Tag Cloud menu on the left and click on "Growing Plants" to see the September 15, 2008 post with a link to growing other types of bulbs.

 

Cover of September 2009 Science and ChildrenRead the activity about planting

spring-flowering bulbs in the

 Early Years column in the September

issue of Science and Children, the

National Science Teachers Association

elementary school journal.

 

 

 

Teacher and child planting bulbsIf all your students are years beyond the exploring-with-their-mouth stage then they can plant my favorite flower, daffodils or jonquils. If there is any chance that a student might bite into a bulb, buy Camassia spp. (also called Camas, Quamash, and Wild Hyacinth) bulbs which are a safe plant to eat (although I never have). Check out plant toxicity online using the lists for unsafe and safe plants at the California Poison Control System at http://www.calpoison.org/hcp/KNOW%20YOUR%20PLANTS-plant%20list%20for%20CPCS%2009B.pdf before making garden choices. And most importantly, know your students and be watchful.

 

 

 

 

Sing a song before and after planting bulbs, and all winter long while wondering if the bulbs really will sprout.

Act out the following song while you sing it, to the tune of the traditional song “Jack in the Box”.

Spring flowering bulb, (children curl face down on floor, hiding face)

So safe in the ground,

Way down inside, your little dirt mound, (hands curve over head)

Spring flowering bulb so quiet and still,

Won’t you sprout up? (heads up and jump up, stretch arms up high)

Of course I will!

 

Do you have a favorite book about planting flowering bulbs? Both non-fiction and fiction that ties into the science topic are useful. Here are some that have been successful in my classes:

BA Flower Grows by Ken Robbins. 1990. Dial Books.

The book follows the growth of an amaryllis bulb through photos.

BFrom Bulb to Daffodil by Ellen Weiss. 2007. Children's Press (CT).

This excellent book includes plant structure details through photography and introduces some vocabulary so it can be useful for English language learners as well as early readers. I wish the book did not use the word “sleeping” instead of “leaf senescence” to describe the leaf and flower die-back because young children can learn, and like to use, big words that are more precise. “Senescence.” I clap and say it to help myself remember: sen-nes-ence, (sə nes′-əns).

BThe Life Cycle of a Flower by Molly Aloian and Bobbie Kalman. 2004. Crabtree Publishing Company.

Photographs reveal the details of flower structures and plant parts and the text describes seed production and other ways plants reproduce.

BInvestigate Plants by Sue Barraclough. 2009. Heinemann Library.

With a question and answer format, this book asks readers to answer before turning the page.

BPlanting a Rainbow by Lois Elhert. 1988. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

This classic shows bulbs in the ground before sprouting and when blooming.

 

What seasons do you experience? Do your students remember the way it rained and rained last spring or the big snow that happened as long as 1/4 their lifetime ago? Here are some books for discussing the cycle of seasons and the passage of time with young children:

B Boxes for Katje by Candace Fleming Candace Fleming and Stacey Dressen-McQueen. 2003. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

This story about tough times in post World War II Holland is based on the experiences of the author’s mother who sent boxes to a family in Holland.

B Spring: An Alphabet Acrostic by Steven Schnur, illustrated by Leslie Evans. 1999. Clarion Books.

Spring from A to Z, each page an acrostic poem beginning with the letters of the alphabet. Your class may want to write their own acrostic poem about a word related to the season. The series includes Winter, Summer, and Autumn.

B What Comes in Spring by Barbara Horton, illustrated by Ed Young. 1992. Knopf.

In this story a mother relates the family’s milestones to the seasons.

B When This Box is Full by Patricia Lillie, illustrated by Donald Crews. 1993. Greenwillow Books.

Children love to guess what the girl will put in the box next to represent the month (one object per month). It reminds me of The Important Book by Margaret Wise Brown in that it says what is important to a child about a time of year. For me it would be ice, a heart, seeds, a kite, sunscreen, swimming pool, a novel, tomatoes, school supplies, birthday cake, pumpkins, and a candle. What would you and your class choose?

B A Year in the City by Kathy Henderson, illustrated by Paul Howard. 1996. McGraw-Hill.

Some seasonal changes are specific to urban environments: snow grey with car exhaust, Chinese New Year parades, and city park garden blooms.

 

Share the seasonal books you find useful by posting a comment below. Hope you get to plant with your class!

Peggy

Published: Aug-29-09 | 2 Comments | 0 Links to this post

Aug07

Citizen science: collaborative projects for teachers and their class

I was excited to see a Monarch butterfly land on the Butterfly Bush in the yard (I hesitate to call it a garden).

From NSTA The Early Years Blog

 

Milk weed plant with seed pods but no caterpillarsDoes that mean that the Milkweed plant may yet become a home to Monarch caterpillars? I haven’t seen any eggs but there is still time. Maybe another insect has already staked a claim to the Milkweed, making it unattractive to butterflies. Monarch butterfly migration is the subject of a citizen science project called Monarch Watch, which encourages the creation of “Monarch Waystations”, plantings of caterpillar food (milkweeds) and nectar sources for the adult butterflies. This is a project your class could initiate in the spring after studying the butterfly life cycle.

 

Read more about butterflies and how they are the same and different from moths in What’s the Difference Between a Butterfly and a Moth? by Robin Koontz with informative illustrations by Brandelin-Dacey (Picture Window Books, 2010).  Both are in the group Lepidoptera and your children will love to become Lepidopterists, butterfly and moth scientists. Butterfly information is also available online from California to Florida.  See the Educators' Guide: Butterfly Rainforest at the Florida Museum of Natural History for answers to questions such as “How do Lepidoptera see, taste and hear?”

 

Citizen science projects are one way to connect your class with habitats other than your local one, and to broaden their knowledge of the world while helping them understand that sometimes science is a collection of data collected over time by many individuals. Here are some activity ideas that may inspire you to participate with your class, and join with others in a network to provide data that can be used by other classes and scientists.

 

In the Square of Life project, students plot square meters in their school yards and record all the living and non-living things they find in the square. They compare the information with what other classes have found by looking at the information posted on the website. View student reports to see how your class can learn by participating in the project which was developed by Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education (CIESE) and Bank Street College of Education .

 

In Bucket Buddies, another CIESE project,  students collect samples from ponds to answer the question: Are the organisms found in pond water the same all over the world?  Then they compare their data with that from other classes and look for patterns.

 

One of the many species of fireflies, or lightening bugsParticipating in Firefly Watch means observing and recording the presence or absence of fireflies in your area. Read about "How These Beetles Create Light" and what scientists know in David Farenthold’s article in the Washington Post.

 

On one recent morning with the unseasonable summer temperature of 64 F, I saw a bumble bee resting on a purple cone flower, perhaps waiting for the sun to warm it up. I was tempted to pet it! If you are in Illinois and your students are interested in taking photos of bees, learn about Beespotters, another project where citizen scientists lend a hand.   One beespotter’s photo showed a rusty-patched bumble bee, Bombus affinis, a bee that was thought to be locally extinct!

 

Learning about the lives of insects can expand our students' world.

Peggy

Published: Aug-07-09 | 0 Comments | 0 Links to this post

Apr28

Connecting to the weather

Can you tell that it will rain soon by the way the air smells? Do you like the smell of snow? I like the way the air smells just as a badly needed rain begins—it makes me think of the earth exhaling as the water soaks in (but this could be a misconception on my part).

(Click on the photo to see the details of the raindrops and the fallen redbud tree flowers.)

From NSTA The Early Years Blog

Rainfall is a significant event in children’s lives, in some places a daily one, while in others a rare pleasure. Rainy days usually mean that children play indoors so they may not know how much it rained or how long. What can we do to connect children to the patterns in nature determined by precipitation?

Taking brief note of the weather as part of a daily circle or calendar is more common in early childhood classrooms than recording those weather observations through drawings, photography, or writing. When temperature, precipitation, and cloud cover are recorded on a year-long chart, seasonal changes can be easily seen.

From NSTA The Early Years Blog

Notable events, such as, “the storm that blew down the big tree” or snow days that closed school, can be highlighted and reflected upon. If you record weather phenomena, compare your class’ results with that of the National Weather Service, Climate Prediction Center.  Recording the weather can help children make sense of the natural phenomena that are not in our control but affect our lives profoundly. I knew a three-year-old who cried when she noticed any clouds moving overhead. I wonder if drawing the clouds daily in a notebook might have reassured her that they were a familiar occurrence, and not threatening. Teachers who live in areas with occasional severe weather—how do you talk about it with young children? Please add your comments by clicking on the word "Comment" below.

Peggy

Published: Apr-28-09 | 2 Comments | 18 Links to this post

Mar09

Classification

Snack sorting! It’s an interesting way to involve students in classifying and, while sitting together to eat, there is time to talk about why certain groupings were chosen. Children might sort by shape, create an ABAB pattern, and count the number of each snack shape.

From NSTA The Early Years Blog

 

From NSTA The Early Years Blog
Classification is the theme for the March 2008 issue of Science and Children. 
From NSTA The Early Years Blog
I was especially interested in the performance standard scale for the process of classification developed by a group of first-grade teachers in the Coast Metro school districts of British Columbia, Canada (see “Classifying Classification”, pgs. 25-29). The scale details the skills and behavior that may be seen in first graders as they classify and answer these questions:

How are these the same? How are they different? Is there another way you can sort theses into groups? Where would you place this new item in your system? Explain.

 

The teachers put classification skills on a continuum from Matching, to Sorting, to Categorizing, to Interpreting, “to help them describe how students move through different levels of classification tasks.”

I’m eager to apply this model to the next classification task I introduce in my teaching, and improve the sequence of classifying tasks we work on next year.

Peggy

Published: Mar-09-09 | 3 Comments | 0 Links to this post

Nov08

Corn ears--examine and measure

“Why is corn used as a decoration in the fall in the United States?” asked a student’s grandmother. She is originally from Estonia where she said seasonal decorative include straw weavings, hung as symbols to bring a good harvest in the next year. I don’t know when it became popular to hang ears of multicolored corn (Zea mays) as decoration in the United States but it may come from the harvesting of dried corn in the fall. Whatever the origin of this decoration, as symbols of a good harvest, or wishes for such in the coming year, by decorating with varieties that don’t usually appear on our plates we expose children to a variety of corn ears. The variety in corn is interesting to children and prepares them to study genetics when they are older. Worldwide, the word “corn” can refer to any local grain.

Photo by Keith Weller, in the photo gallery on the Agricultural Research Service website.

 

Young children love to ‘dissect’ ears of fresh or dried corn and can learn new words while learning plant structure—first the husk, then the silk, then the harder job of picking the kernels off the cob. Place a variety of dried corn cobs in a bin or sensory table and allow children to take them apart. See the November issue of Science and Children to read about examining and measuring corn ears in The Early Years column.

Maybe in the spring you'll plant Zea mays with your class.

Peggy

Published: Nov-08-08 | 0 Comments | 518 Links to this post

Oct22

Sink? Float? Try it with pumpkins

For an activity to explore buoyancy—what materials and which objects sink or float in water—I gave each child in a small group an object to hold. Then I explained that we were going to think about the objects and say where we think they will come to rest in a big tub of water—at the bottom or near the top of the water—BEFORE we put the objects in the water. Most of the two-year-olds are in the “thought is action” stage and immediately dropped (threw, in some cases) the objects in the tub. “I think it’s going to…It’s floating!”

The four-year-olds seemed to savor their anticipation of “doing”. They took their time to tell where they thought the object would come to rest before testing their prediction. It’s wonderful to work with children who are not afraid to be “wrong”. My hope is that I do nothing to change that. 

Pumpkins are fun objects to use in this activity. Children often predict that the largest one will sink, even after witnessing the smallest and the medium pumpkins floating. Children can record their results by drawing the pumpkin shape on a teacher-made template of the tub.

Some children may notice and explore the effect of magnification, especially if the tub you use is round.

Read the October Teaching Through Tradebooks column, Pumpkins! By Karen Ansberry and Emily Morgan for more pumpkin exploration (grades K-6) with literature connections to How Many Seeds in a Pumpkin? by Margaret McNamara and Pumpkin Circle by George Levenson. 

Peggy

Published: Oct-22-08 | 0 Comments | 359 Links to this post