Tried something new...

Tried something new in my 4th grade Inquiry class this week. The lab, Hot Stuff, focuses on heat and energy, asking the basic question, "What can we do to melt the most ice in 2 minutes?" It can be fun during the data collection and hands-on stages. Handing a kid a film canister (oh, and can I mention that half of them didn't know what it was?) full of ice and saying, "Do whatever you want to this except putting it in your mouth or opening it; get it to melt completely melt in the next 4 minutes," tends to get their attention.

But, that writing portion is still a killer. I can't do any of the things I really want to do - a serious hands-on experiment every day, an engineering challenge with every lab (this one would be a great time to build solar ovens or just test different materials for insulation), truly self-directed inquiry - because of the time constraints. I need ways to get every student in the world actually excited about writing. Not exactly easy.

So, I needed something that would get them to, energetically, participate in the steps of how to write up a good question, a good hypothesis, and - MOST IMPORTANTLY - a good plan.

I put up an overhead:

I told them these were answers I had read on another class' papers, and asked them if they were good. They quickly identified (since I didn't make it hard) that C was the right answer on both. The first classroom was VERY enthusiastic about this method. I had hands raised from students who hadn't participated at all in the previous 2 days of class. The 2^nd and 3^rd classrooms were not as excited about it, but there was greater participation then there would have been if I was just talking. Now, they could see and read the wrong answers themselves. They could discuss what made them right or wrong. It took 5 more minutes, but I think that in the first two rooms, it made hypothesis writing go faster than usual.

So, I tried it with the Plan too. Hoping, desperately, to avoid having students tell me that the plan for their experiment is to, "do their experiment," I gave them three examples:

It worked, in two out of three classes. We still didn't have time to finish our experiments - they'll be melting ice tomorrow too - but it was better. I didn't leave it up on the overhead in the first room - they had the talent to do it on their own. They had been impressing me all week (I had to invent an extra experiment to model on Tuesday, they had finished my regular experiment on Monday), and still managed to get to some of the trials today. The second room didn't work as hard, but they'll start the experiment on time tomorrow. The third room... well, no one told me today was their early release day, so we lost 20 minutes of class. And they work a bit slower still. We'll finish tomorrow, somehow. The teacher has offered extra time after lunch tomorrow.