Taking A Zoologist Across Disciplines All I did was ask students to list and explain three "disciplines." Let's take it a bit further!
Updating Old Questions: Volcano from Two Perspectives Just because we have two perspectives doesn't mean we have a great question!
Think Like An Engineer: Egg Drop At our school, 6th graders participate in an annual egg drop. To increase the rigor, I looked for unique scientific roles and came up with three: designing a parachute to slow the egg's descent, testing materials to pack inside the structure, and developing the structure itself. Each of these roles will be developed into a scientific discipline.
Pop Quiz! Rock Cycle Depth and Complexity Here are a set of questions someone sent in. What do you think?
Creating A New Creature We're not doing a fluffy art project here. Kids are developing a realistic, made up creature that could have actually lived in a particular biome.
The Marshmallow Challenge A fantastic fuzzy problem to start the year. Students use pasta and tape to try to get a marshmallow up as high as possible.
Climbing Bloom’s Taxonomy In Science Science should be more than memorizing facts. Let's spice it up and push our students from the doldrums of remembering to the soaring heights of evaluation. While it's true that this will take longer than just following a textbook, we're not just teaching facts, we're equipping students with the ability to make well-informed judgements.
