Exploring Our Fluid Earth

My students are nervous about paper/ pen activities without a book in front of them. So, I tried to think of a way to teach (or re-teach) this lesson without all of the anxiety. We decided to take it outside to the playground with some fat slabs of sidewalk chalk. First, they drew giant Phase Diagrams about the size of the 4 Square court and labeled them with all the IN... words. (They brought their "Learning Logs" for reference too.) We selected a recent experiment to try. They then put the Modes cards around their neck, which were hanging from some lanyards we had left over from Field Day. They had to decide which of the 10 Modes would "play" that round and which would sit out. The "score keeper" drew arrows as they moved from one Phase to the next and eventually had a pattern of their movement. Of course, after a while they devised another "game" while still wearing the Modes and bouncing a ball for the number of times they were in each Phase. They seemed to be engaged and moving around the Phases, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't really very scientific. It got them using the vocabulary and thinking about how they moved through the Phases. The only draw back is that you have to have a playground big enough-- oh, and a school willing to let you deface the surface with chalk. Luckily, we had lots of rain after that!