Exploring Our Fluid Earth

Well, curiosity was easy to solicit when I held up a bag of M&Ms!

This lesson went well with my class. We had great participation in our class discussion about why our predictions about color percentages were either right on the mark or way off. Personal/real-life experiences were easy to connect for my 5th graders in this procedure. We barely had enough time to eat the M&Ms at the end of the lesson.

Great lesson and my students were able to implement new math skills to complete the procedure.

I've done intertidal and reef-flat transecting several times with students. One of the things I learned is that if the students are doing a transect for the first time on the only day you can take them to the ocean, you will regret it. There are so many "distractions" (critters, waves, and other good stuff) that it's really hard to keep kids' attention focused enough to teach transecting well...and invariably the quality of their data is poor on the first day.

This was a really great activity! my students had a lot of fun and were really engaged through out the activity. I modified the graphs by putting in the colors for them and this helped keep it in order, especially when we were combining our data for the class data. Also I had them look at the M&M's as species in a coral reef and this allowed them to apply this activity to our class more. GREAT ACTIVITY!!!

This was a good exercise. Next Time I would like to spend more time on statistical analysis of the data and teach about standatd deviations and various statistical tests to show if the results are significant. Did anyone else do this?

I wish I could take my kids out and do this but theres just NO time with HSAs and everything else so I have to do this in my room but get it cleaned up fast enough for my other periods to have a "normal" classroom.

Any ideas of how to do this in a fast and simple way?? =)

And lo! the deed is done! This is my third and final lesson for this course! BOOYAH! 1 reflection, a couple of tests, and a portfolio left *does happy dance of joy*

So here is lesson #2 - my choice activity - a student designed inquiry using PV panels as a power source for exploration and sampling on the surface of another planet in our solar system!! The kids really enjoyed this!! Thanks Andy for being so fearless and just diving into the process of combining IEI stuff and TSIA!

Ball going down a ramp to model acceleration.

My students enjoyed this activity. Several of my "surfer" boys really got into it. At lunch I set up the mock site and upon entering the room told them that they were going to the beach. We decided what each colored object would represent. My kids worked really well together on this and enjoyed using the transects. They came up with really good sampling methods that made sense and enjoyed their learning experience. I also used butcher paper. One of the boys helped me crinkle up the black and grey paper that was to represent a lava ledge and some rocks...

....or sample anything in chemistry. Just curious about your ideas. Thanks.

e.g. I am wondering how to...

e.g. I am wondering how to...

Calling the index cards, index cards is, well, bland. I wanted to ask what other people called their cards, tickets, popsicle sticks, etc. For example, for mine, the blue tickets were pipipi, the green cards were limu, the blue index cards opihi, and the piles of popsicle sticks were wana.

e.g. I am wondering how to...

Just finished this activity with my 9th graders that are studying Marine Science. I was short on time due to setup time with one class (we share classrooms at my school), so they only collected transect point intercept data. The second class did quadrat data collection where we counted everything in the quadrat.

The combination of doing the pizza introduction and then the MM sampling activity was perfect! As soon as my students walked into the room, I started handing out the pizza samples, saying "Pizza samples, pizza samples, have a taste!" Students were completely caught off guard, gave me some weird looks, but then looked amused/intrigued. Their bellringer question was to infer what kind of pizza I'm trying to sell them based on their individual sample.

e.g. I am wondering how to...

e.g. I am wondering how to...

This was a very successful activity and can be applied to any discipline in science. Of course any time you have food, students are engaged! I created a spreadsheet for the invidual students to enter their data. When I realized that to have them copy all the data was too time consuming and frustrating for many I directed them to just record the totals and percents at the bottom so they could go ahead and respond to the activity questions.