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I must admit I’m a fan of mystery novels—from Nancy Drew to Sherlock Holmes, from Agatha Christie to Tony Hillerman. I enjoy trying to follow the clues and the thinking process of the protagonist. In contemporary stories (and TV programs), it’s also interesting to see how science is part of the investigation.

The interdisciplinary activities that are shared in this issue show how learning science can be embedded into interesting and purposeful activities that can be applied to everyday events. High school teachers could adapt these activities and use them as club activities or for those days in between units. I’ve noted the SciLinks topics that would support the content or include additional activities. [For starters, try Forensics]

The Case of the Missing Zooxanthellae is whodunit simulation in which students analyze clues to solve a mystery. One of the clues in this case is DNA. I’ve seen activities that had students string beads to illustrate DNA molecules, but in this activity, students “analyze” DNA models to solve the mystery. The article also includes a Reader’s Theatre-type script and background information on the topic for the teacher. [SciLinks: Coral Reefs, Cnidarians, DNA Fingerprinting]

The author of Who Stole the Doughnuts describes in detail the lesson that she and her colleagues developed, complete with a crime scene, suspects, and activities for students to analyze clues in hair and soil samples, handwriting, fingerprints, and footprints. She concludes by saying “… it was difficult to tell who had more fun—the students or the teachers.” Perhaps it would be effective to share the fun and have the students use what they learn to create additional mysteries for younger students. [SciLinks: Fingerprints]

To solve the mystery in Spooky Suspects, students analyze unknown substances to determine the presence of protein, sugar, starch, and lipids. Rather than isolated lab exercises, students see the application of these tests. [SciLinks: Proteins, Lipids, Starches]

If you and your students are thinking of creating your own whodunits, the article The Move to Movies: Instruction That Engages has suggestions for using video editing software (that now comes with many computers). Perhaps you or a student will be the next Alfred Hitchcock!

It’s no mystery that students are interested in electronics and music. A Middle School Sound Study shows how to incorporate those interests into a unit on sound, culminating with students building speakers for an MP3 device. [SciLinks: What Is Sound?, Waves, Resonance, Characteristics of Waves, Using Waves to Communicate]

A Coprolite Mystery: Who Dung It? should be very appealing to middle schoolers. I learned that a coprolite is fossilized excrement, and it’s an example of a “trace fossil” rather than the actual remains of an animal. (Owl pellets are another form of indirect evidence). The author provides a lot of background information, photographs, and class activities. [SciLinks: Fossils, Excretory System]

Flooded! describes activities to help demystify the relationship between climate change and sea level. [SciLinks: Water Cycle, Sea Level Change, Change in Climate]  Although it’s not technically a mystery or whodunit, the article Windmills Are Going Around Again demystifies this renewable resource with activities (using the 5E model). Several years ago, I was part of a PD workshop that used wind energy as the focus for helping teachers develop inquiry lessons. Two resources (also mentioned in the article) that we found useful were Kidwind and Wind from the US Department of Energy. [SciLinks: Wind Energy]

One mystery to many teachers is the misconceptions people have about the reason for the seasons. Just in time for the equinox, the Scope on the Skies column focuses on this topic. [SciLinks: Reasons for the Seasons, What Causes Earth's Seasons?]

It’s easy for students to focus on the novelty of these mysteries and whodunits. It’s essential, therefore, for teachers to help students make the connection between these engaging activities and the science behind them.

See more of Doug Wechsler's work at http://www.dougwechsler.com/

In Upper Roxborough in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, children helped toads and frogs survive their migratory passage across a road, back to their natal pond (a reservoir) to lay their eggs. The volunteers recorded a count of toads, alive or dead. Naturalist-led toad walks help families understand the toad behavior. The Toad Detour blog has more details of the continuing effort.

Leigh Ashbrook, environmental science teacher, (and my cousin!) said, “The American toads and pickerel frogs are on the move by The Schuylkill Center, and volunteers have been helping safeguard their crossings over the busy roads by the reservoir to which they are homing to lay their eggs. The trilling of the toads is so beautiful! I lead an education ”toad walk” on Saturday night, and was pleased that several families came to learn about natural history of toads and to support the detouring of local traffic during toad migration.”

For students and teachers in northern Virginia, spring break usually arrives with warmer weather. For this science teacher, it comes a little too late. I’d like to be in the schoolyard helping the children document the changes in the plants which happen so fast this time of year.

To identify your local amphibians, check out the resources listed at the USGS site, An Online Guide for the Identification of Amphibians in North America north of Mexico. A web search for “frog calls” will turn up several sites where you can listen to calls to identify those you can hear but not see. Please note that toads and frogs can die from infectious diseases, and spread disease if they are exposed when raised in captivity and later released. The Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles (SSAR) and Amphibian Ark describe how to sterilize containers before capture and after release.

Happy spring to all,

Peggy

This is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a Madagascar hissing beetle. I enjoy going to NSTA conferences because I get to see all sorts of denizens of the animal world that I would never get a chance to view ordinarily.

During their workshop on Connecting With Animals in the Classroom, Stephanie Selznick (left) and Suzanne Flynn showed us some of their friends in the animal world and described how teachers could “create the ‘aha!’ moment for students by teaching about animals. Suzanne said treating students to the sight of a mother gerbil giving birth and nursing her baby is something students will never forget—and can inspire a love for science. “Kids love to look at and touch live things,” said Stephanie.

Teaching about animals also provides a vehicle for linking other subjects to science—and “the more links, the more thinks” for students, said Suzanne. Young children can count an animal’s legs and even create Venn diagrams about the animal’s characteristics and compare them with those of other animals, for example. That sounds much more fun than the Venn diagrams I remember doing in elementary school!

Suzanne described how teachers could use the NSTA/CBC Outstanding Science Trade Books and find other books using NSTA Recommends to integrate language arts into lessons involving animals. She praised the scientific accuracy of the books on the NSTA/CBC lists.

Stephanie told us about a 20-minute activity for fifth graders that can be used as an end-of-unit assessment. She has her students choose an animal they’ve studied and write four or five facts about it on a card. Her fourth graders have created “notebooks of cool facts” about their favorite animal, including its physical features, its favorite foods, and how it can be characterized.

Other than two insects that leaped out of their containers and had to be rescued (both successfully!), the workshop went very smoothly, and I heard many teachers say “Great session” as they prepared to leave for their next adventure.

I was talking to a first time attendee on the trolley from the hotel to the convention center this morning. Cecelia Dygdon told me the web site was overwhelming, she found a lot of sessions she wanted to attend, but didn’t immediately realize they were spread out between the convention center and a couple nearby hotels. She was headed to the first time attendee meeting, so I’m sure she’ll get some great advice from the folks there.

Photo Credit: Creative Commons Seashells are multifunctional. In addition to housing and protecting an organisim, they can be used to spark scientific curiosity and literacy.

Cecelia describes herself as a career-changer, having worked in industry for several years after teaching for a short time after college. She’s now a high school chemistry and physical science teacher in the Chicago, Illinois area. She says she came to the conference because “it’s good for me to hone my skills. I really need to relearn things; not just content but pedagogy.” Cecelia is in the Department of Education’s ACTS program.

The first session I planned to attend was packed to overflowing. I couldn’t even get close to the door! Apparently a lot of educators got up this morning with Differentiated Science Inquiry on their minds.

Good thing I had another session in mind as an alternative, Connect the Dots to Help Students Develop Literacy Skills Along with Science Content. Karen Ostlund shared how she has incorporated literacy into scientific exploration for sea shells. Hands-on activities for the participants, and examples of student work illustrated her methods well. Interesting fact I learned in the session this morning—shell colors are like a “memory,” recording changes to the mollusk’s environment.

Early spring flowers on a red bud tree.

Red bud tree leaves in fall.

Give your students practice making observations by doing a seasonal scavenger hunt that will require closer looks at the familiar landscape to see what has changed. (Thanks to the University of British Columbia Botanical Garden and Centre for Plant Research for the idea.)

Does the tree (with branches low enough to see) have tightly furled flower or leaf buds, leaves the size of a squirrel’s ear, or leaves that are fully grown and changing color? Checklists can use both words and pictures to list items.

Use a new checklist for each season and include some of the following items to look for if they apply to your school yard:

Plants

• Leaf size on deciduous plants (choose any or a particular plant)
• Flower buds forming, blooming, forming seeds(choose any or a particular plant)
• Flower bulb leaves growing above ground, dying back

Animals

• Baby animals in the fields
• Tracks in mud, sand, or snow

Birds

• In groups or alone
• What are they eating?
• Birds building nests

Insects and other small animals

• Bees or other pollinators on flowers
• Small animals (roly-polies, caterpillars) visible in the garden

Weather

• Temperature
• Precipitation
• Windy or calm
• Snow on the ground
• Ice on water bodies
• People dressed in boots, coats, sandals, shorts, carrying umbrellas.

"Honesty" plant in bloom in spring.

"Honesty" plant seed pods in fall.

The scavenger hunt observations can be posted each month to make it easier to see how the observations have changed over the year. Some months no student will see a bee and other months every student will see some.

What other items should be added to an outdoor scavenger hunt list for your schoolyard?

Peggy

Bird counts involve children in citizen science projects where a greater community contributes to the data used by scientists to understand bird behavior and more. The Great Backyard Bird Count is happening now and counting can take place through Monday, February 15th, so there is still time for your students to participate.

This annual four-day event is led by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and National Audubon Society, with Canadian partner Bird Studies Canada and sponsorship from Wild Birds Unlimited. Gathering data over many years makes them more meaningful. The shortest length of observation that can be submitted is just the right amount of time for young children—15 minutes! And, you do not have to be outside to count. Counting from a window is perfectly acceptable and “Your counting always counts!” Visit the Great Backyard Bird Count at www.birdsource.org/gbbc/ and learn how your students can contribute data.

I’ll let you know what I see tomorrow. There are plenty of Mourning Doves, House Sparrows, Blue Jays, Northern Cardinals, and Black-capped Chickadees around even with all the snow we’ve had in the last weeks.

Peggy

Some children love pandas, some love dogs, but many more love dinosaurs. At times it seems young children feel dinosaurs are “more real”—more interesting, more important, more present in their minds—than modern animals. “More real” might be an exaggeration, but details about dinosaurs are verbalized more often than those about most modern animals. They can tell you that “ a Troodon has three toes and one extra long sharp claw” and “a T.Rex has really big sharp teeth” but have difficulty describing the length or number of teeth or toes of a dog. (Just my perception, and not a result from any kind of survey, or maybe it’s my own prejudice, reflecting my interest in fossils.)

You can use this intense interest in dinosaurs to teach about how animal body shapes help animals survive in their environment. To get children to think about and research how dinosaurs lived, ask the children, “If you were a dinosaur, what kind of dinosaur would you be?” Open-ended questions about their dinosaur will encourage them to search and talk about details—“What shape were its feet? I wonder what its ears looked like, or why were its eyes on the sides of its head?”

Use the resources listed in this post and in the January 2010 Early Years column in Science and Children. Teachers and older students can use The Dino Database to learn how to pronounce dinosaur names and how they are grouped. Design activities or assignments that draw attention to details such as type of teeth, shape of feet, and fossil evidence for behavior such as living in herds or nest building. This directs their thinking to how the shape of the dinosaur and fossil evidence gives clues to how they may have lived.

Children reveal their understanding in their imaginative play. Do they have the toy Maiasauras construct nests and care for the babies, and have the carnivorous Coelophysis (also called “Rioarribasaurus”) eat only animals, and when pretending to be Diplodocus on the playground do they run in herds?

While learning about dinosaurs students can learn about the nature of science—how, with further study and new technology, new discoveries are made changing what we know about dinosaurs.

Here are some resources that will be of interest to you and your students.

Books about dinosaurs, nonfiction and fiction

• Dinosaurs, Amazing Dinosaurs: The Fiercest, the Tallest, the Toughest, the Smallest, and Amazing Dinosaurs: More Feathers, More Claws, Big Horns, Wide Jaws! all by Dougal Dixon (1998, 2000, and 2007, Boyds Mills Press). Details are easy to see in the large drawings about the variety in dinosaur bodies.
• First Dinosaur Encyclopedia by DK Publishing (2006, DK Children). With a timeline and fascinating details about specific dinosaurs, this book will help teachers and children alike make sense of the ever-expanding list of known dinosaur species—when and how they lived.
• How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? and How Do Dinosaurs Say I Love You? series by Jane Yolen, illustrated by Mark Teague (2000, 2009, Blue Sky Press). No one is better than Jane Yolen at imaginative story telling, and children love to see themselves represented as the dinosaurs they imagine themselves to be. See if your class can identify dinosaurs such as the Kentrosaurus or Pachycephalosaurus outside of their usual habitat, and tell you what their bodies were able to do.

Resources about scientific work

• Watch “Uncovering Tawa hallae”, a 5 minute National Science Foundation audio slideshow about the discovery and analysis of the fossil of a Triassic, carnivorous dinosaur. Scroll down and click on “downloads” to print out cool photos of the fossil, the reconstructed skeleton, the Ghost Ranch fossil bed, and the paleontologist team.
• In Science News for Kids (11/19/09), paleontologist Jack Horner tells how fossils representing what were thought to be 3 kinds of dinosaurs were revealed by CAT scans to (probably) be only one kind, but at 3 different stages of growth, juvenile, teenager, and adult.
• When I was growing up, dinosaurs were thought to be slow moving animals that dragged their tails. The books we owned were, Dinosaurs (A Little Golden Book) by Jane Werner Watson, illustrated by William de J. Rutherfoord (Golden Press;1959), and a work of fiction, Danny and the Dinosaur (An I Can Read Book, Level 1) by Syd Hoff (1958, HarperCollins). Since then scientists have researched how animals balance and the type of stride that would make the fossilized footprints that have been uncovered—without an accompanying tail print—and determined that dinosaurs probably lifted their tails as they moved.
• Teachers can see lists of works with early illustrations of dinosaurs on these sites to use when searching for illustrations that represent out-dated ideas:
  • Vintage Dinosaur Book Web Page
  • Old Dinosaur Books
• What’s Wrong With This Picture? An Audio Critique: Listen to dinosaur paleontologist Thomas Holtz talk about tail dragging versus raised tails and other revisions on National Geographic. com

Activities to assess children’s knowledge about how dinosaurs related to their habitat

Build a diorama

Construct a
diorama based on research—picture research or text reading. Provide shoeboxes, small, accurate models of dinosaurs, plasticine clay to anchor the dinosaurs and paper to draw pictures of the appropriate habitat including food source. (Hint: trioramas can be made with a single sheet of paper if you do not have easy access to shoeboxes. See www.reallygoodstuff.com/pdfs/144012.pdf and www.mcsdk12.org/curr/WebQuests/Spider/Triorama.htm for directions.)

Write a poem

Write a poem about a physical characteristic of the chosen dinosaur explaining how the body part functioned to help the dinosaur species survive. Your students might be inspired by Jack Prelutsky’s Tyrannosaurus Was a Beast (illustrated by Arnold Lobel). Some language may be above most young children but those who love language will enjoy the challenging words such as “slaughtered”, “nibbled”, “perpetual”, and “morsel.”

Play a game

Play “I’m thinking of a dinosaur body feature that is for…” and have students call out names of dinosaur body features which fit the named category (eating plants, catching animals, keeping warm, running fast, balancing a big head, eating meat, hiding among plants, climbing, or other description that allows for many answers). For example, “I’m thinking of a dinosaur body feature that would help a dinosaur see well to hunt.” Possible correct answers: big eyes, eyes facing forward, good eyesight. Students could be asked to explain their answer and give an example of a dinosaur that shows that body shape.

Have a good time using dinosaurs as the topic for learning about how animal bodies are shaped to perform a particular function,

Peggy

There has been an interesting discussion going on among the middle and high school science teachers on the NSTA General Science email list about the lack of direct experience in their students’ background. Some have suggested that early childhood and elementary schools are not laying the groundwork for the later learning.

One teacher said, “I was talking to an honors ninth grade class and most of the students said they had not seen a live grasshopper. This explains why several schools have started their biology classes with the ecosystems because they want students to be able to see and experience life sciences before moving to conceptual ideas in biochemistry and genetics.”

The National Science Education Content Standards (A and C) for K-4 call for all students to develop:

• Abilities necessary to do scientific inquiry
• Understanding about scientific inquiry

and

• The characteristics of organisms
• Life cycles of organisms
• Organisms and environments

I know grasshoppers from a childhood field—with two visible bulbous eyes, pincher-like mouthparts, barbs on the hind legs, and wings that you don’t notice until one goes zooming past you. And they spit tobacco! At least that is what we called the “partially digested food material along with some semi-toxic compounds from the insect’s crop region.” It stained our palms when we held a grasshopper too tightly. Have your students had that experience?

Children are fascinated with beetles and other small animals.

I’ll share this comment with the early childhood teachers I work with to let them know how vital the experiences they make happen, or take advantage of, are to their students’ future learning. It may inspire us to take walking fieldtrips to a nearby field or brush at the edge of a parking lot to look for wildlife, or encourage them to keep a container of Tenebrio beetles (mealworms) in the classroom.

Here are two great sites about grasshoppers and other insects:

• Grasshoppers: Their biology, Identification, and Management. USDA-ARS-Northern Plains Agricultural Research Lab in Sidney, Montana
• Using Live Insects in the Elementary Classrooms: For Early Lessons in Life. The University of Arizona’s Center for Insect Science Education Outreach

A few crickets are still chirping and crawling under leaves in my neighborhood but I rarely see grasshoppers. Time to create a small habitat so students can bring a cricket inside for a week!

Peggy