Students love learning outdoors, but how do you ensure they are absorbing the science and gaining skills as they do so? The authors found a way—a fourth-grade classroom teacher, a gifted/science resource teacher, and a group of fourth graders—embarked on a yearlong study of birds and the plants they depend on. They used their school yard as the backdrop and incorporated community resources into numerous hands-on experiences that transformed students into eager wildlife investigators and stewards of their local environment. Here they share their inspiring story.
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Little did Linda Froschauer know that she would one day find herself in the position of editor of the very journal that helped in the formation of her teaching… the journal that inspired her teaching and affected her students. She viewed Science and Children as her window into the classroom of her peers throughout the teaching community. Here she encourages you to open your classroom window and share your lessons that bring the “ah-ha” moments, the lessons you tell others about when you talk about science teaching, and the lessons all of us could benefit from learning about. You’ll never know how many people you touch, but you’ll know the joy of sharing.
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This monthly feature contains facts and challenges for the science explorer.
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An open field—with its wildflowers, grasses, and vole tunnels—became an instant classroom. Students’ senses were awakened there, and upon entering a nearby forest, they immediately detected a difference: less light and cooler air. “Why are there no grasses in the forest? Why aren’t there ferns in the field?” These and other questions emerged as fifth-grade students collected and compared data from both a field and forest at a local Audubon Society wildlife refuge.
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How do young children develop their ideas about science and scientists’ work in their first year of school? How do we teach them to believe they are real scientists? In this article, the authors—a university science educator, a kindergarten teacher, and a Penn State University teaching intern—share their inquiry into these questions in a kindergarten classroom during an exciting, six-week unit on seeds.
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The activity shared here is an animal role-playing lesson developed, field-tested, and refined for Nature’s Neighborhood, a newly designed children’s education facility at the Toledo Zoo. The activity is targeted at students in kindergarten through second grade, but it can be adapted for use in grades three and four as well. Through students’ interactions with others during the role-play and discussions afterward, the understanding that animals need, among other things, food, water, and shelter to survive is reinforced.
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They will come! Wildlife, that is, when you create the right conditions. A wildlife habitat can provide you with an outdoor classroom for studying the needs of organisms. It also provides a place to learn about soil, weather, and plants. If you want to get your students outside in nature, a designated habitat is a great place to start, with endless possibilities.
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Just as with any organism, simple growth causes plants to move, but we’re going to focus on movements that are unique to plants and, in some cases, pretty creepy. Sorry for the pun. Here the author describes a bunch of plant movements and then explains the mechanism for a few of them.
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While pumpkins are an iconic symbol in the classroom that represent fall, harvest time, and Halloween, they are also an ideal subject for teaching elementary students the fundamentals of scientific inquiry and plant decomposition. In a second-grade classroom in New York, the mold, mush, and blackening flesh of a decomposing pumpkin creatively demonstrated decomposition for the Halloween hungry, jack-o-lantern obsessed children. Here the authors describe lessons that were developed as part of a unit on the life cycle of plants.
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We all have our own habitats, and this month students spend time thinking about what other organisms need to survive, what types of habitats they live in, and how to set up a habitat for a classroom animal.
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Planting flower bulbs is a wonderful activity for many reasons: learning about the life cycle of a plant bulb teaches children about seasonal changes and the environmental needs of plants, and children can observe and measure plant growth over time and see the results of their work in the spring. Conversation about where to plant can build awareness of how the outdoor space is used by other people and animals, where the Sun shines on the ground, where the rain falls, and draws attention to soil as a resource. It is also an inexpensive way to have a beautiful garden the children will be proud of and relates to National Science Education Standard C, Life Science.
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A piece of children’s literature can be a powerful tool for teaching and learning science; however, it takes more than reading about a topic to qualify as “doing science.” Inspired by the book, The Gift of the Tree, the author developed an in-depth interdisciplinary lesson for her sixth-grade students without diluting the science. Through this lesson, students read and experience the concepts in the story in two ways—through a macro lens to see how these plants and animals are interconnected, and through a micro lens to learn specific hands-on science skills, such as making inexpensive nonglass slides, looking through the microscope, and observing and recording parts of the tree and other plants.
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In order to demonstrate how plants remove water from the soil and release it to the atmosphere, students compared open- and closed-growing systems using drought-tolerant and higher water requirement plants. Then, students designed a drought-tolerant garden demonstrating what they had learned. Through this experience, students not only learned about evaporation and transpiration in a concrete way, but they also learned about their own local ecosystem and factors affecting it.
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Even though students see plants all around them, they tend to ignore them. Animal studies usually get all the “press.” As a naturalist, children’s book author, and coordinator for an educational science website for teachers, the author knows from personal experience that observing and charting plant growth can be as intriguing as observing animals. Here she shares a simple but thought-provoking activity that teachers can use with fifth- and sixth-grades students: plant research plots. As students monitor the plant growth in one-meter plots over a period of six weeks, they practice science-process skills while learning about plant life cycles and how plants compete with each other.
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