Creating opportunities for teachers to bring new and enhanced experiences to their students
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Thought Starters
Here are some ideas to inspire your projects.
Big Back Yard
There is a lot to wonder at, often within footsteps of the school! In Lexington, MA, the Big Back Yard program takes K-5 students for nature hikes, three times per year, in the woods in the “backyards” of the schools. What started as a small program is now deployed as part of the curricula in six schools. Each school’s walk is adapted to the in-school curriculum and what is available to see in their backyard. The walks are now coordinated and staffed by parent volunteers (people like Jerry!).
Could you start small, with one grade at one school? What’s in your school’s backyard that could tie to the Science curriculum?
Beachcombing
Beaches present many opportunities which are easily adapted to science curricula. What sort of program can you establish that make visits to the beach into hands-on Science?
Ecology: How are plants and animals adapted to the beach, and their niches? What can you observe about shore birds?
Biology: What can you see in ocean water under a microscope? How do plants adapt to salty/brackish water?
Geology: What is sand made of? Where does it come from? How does it move up and down the shore? What are shells made of? How is limestone or sandstone created from these materials?
Engineering: How can we explore gravity and centripetal force? Build a big pile of sand. Convert it into a “ball mountain” – a track running around and down the pile for a tennis ball to follow.
Anthropology: What sorts of tools, jewelry, or artefacts can be made from shells, sea grass, etc.? Which of these might be found by archeologists?
Weather/geophysics/astronomy: What causes tides? How can we measure them? Where do waves come from? How much area is lost if the ocean is 1” higher?
Don’t have a beach within walking distance? A river bank is great too, and a salt marsh is even more interesting!
Iron
Develop a longitudinal curriculum about iron. “Bog iron” played a very important role in the early history of South Jersey.
Elementary: What is bog iron? Can we go look for some? Why was South Jersey bog iron important in the American Revolution?
Middle school: Why is the river water brown? What is living in it? There are also some Revolutionary War battles that occurred as the British tried to seize the NJ iron works!
High School: Can we smelt bog iron? (Do a demonstration of the thermite reaction?) What is steel?
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