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 2nd and 3rd 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.
We're 3/5ths of the way through our Play, Invent, Explore camp, and I'm still just making it up as I go. All of my camps follow the same general outline every day: some non-specific activity to get everyone into the room and excited about camp, 15-20 minutes talking about our plans/activities/the science behind what we'll be doing, activities for about an hour, snack, activities. This camp required a lot of talking the first 2 days in order for the students to learn some of the features of the software, and more "instructional" time then I really like for a camp. I tried to keep it limited, and make sure they had time to explore on their own, but I kept feeling the pull to show them (all, as a group) new pieces to the Cricket puzzle.
Background: This camp is for 8-10 year olds and is run at ScienceWorks. They're working on laptops on loan from Southern Oregon University. And some of the parents walked in, saw the computers, and expressed concern that they weren't too sure if their students were computer-literate enough.
Well, relax, your kid knows how to use the computer. They may not understand how to trouble-shoot all of it, but they are more than capable of learning to use (and create) programs with limited assistance and guidance.
Lesson summary - Monday:
We talked about computer programs, focusing on how the computer doesn't think, it just follows the instructions we give it. The kids each selected a computer, and together we created our first, very simple, program. We turned on a light. Then we changed the color. We added in a few other pieces, one at a time. Each time, I need to draw in their attention and walk them through the step of putting the pieces together to run a new program. The more pieces they had, the harder it became. We added the ability to repeat, to use "random" so the computer would pick the color or brightness, we added the touch button and "wait until - touch" to run pieces of the program. The more I showed them, the more they started to grasp the pattern of how it would work. We made it through light, touch, light sensor, random. Then they had about 15 minutes before the end of camp (3 hours went FAST), and I gave them free reign. Most of them discovered that the speaker worked the same as the light, so it was pretty loud when the parents came in to pick up students.
Lesson summary - Tuesday:
My goal for Tuesday was to show them the similarities between the way the light program pieces worked and the way the sound program pieces worked. First though, we did a verbal review. I drew a short program on the board, exactly the way it would look on their screens, and asked them to tell me what the computer would do if I ran the program. They were stumped for a minute. This was what I was afraid of. They had figured out how to change numbers, move pieces around, use the speaker, etc, but they still didn't understand how to 'read' the program. But we figured it out together. Then they did the speaker. They were given the challenge to use their computer to write part of a song, and then work in groups to play a song together. Most of them figured it out, some stumbled through it, all of them had fun. This is a lesson that would work in an hour or so. After snack, I had them build a Lego 'motion module' - called the "up and down". It was really the only one all of them could build using the materials in their kits. Some of them had time to add bouncy toys on the top of them, some only had time to run it once or twice (and had to have their programs written for them while they finished building the module).
Lesson summary - Wednesday:
My goal today was to have them combine their skills from the first two days into one large project. They were asked to build an animal to go in our 'zoo', an idea I borrowed from the Playful Invention and Exploration website, which has lots of good ideas for the Crickets. I anticipated it taking the first half of camp, and that after snack we'd be able to learn how to collect data (brightness, loudness) and graph it, so that they would understand how the numbers related to reality. Some of them were still finishing their animals and setting them up in the zoo when their parents arrived at 4.
I'm now very nervous about my plan for tomorrow and Friday. It might still work... or I might need to have an 'easier option' for the less agile. We'll see.
