Bubbles and insights

Because the kindergarteners had heard the word 'cell' for the first time last week (around the yeast-peroxide demonstration), I brought in more yeast along with a compound microscope so everybody could really see the single cells of the yeast organism. Everybody enjoyed seeing the little guys floating around at 400x magnification.

One voice piped up from the back,

"There must be hundreds of them!"

A simple comment, but beautiful for its depth of insight. He realized that the several dozen cells piped onto the TV screen via digicam represented one pencil-point-sized view on a much bigger slide, and the slide was made from one half-drop of solution taken from a beaker with a whole 250ml. Hundreds – probably millions of cells were in that beaker.

He realized that, not only were we looking at things on a scale of teeniness that was outside everything his senses had shown him so far, but also that the teeniness would require numbers that he didn't otherwise need in daily reality. You might pick a dozen flowers, or see a hundred pigeons, or pass a thousand cars on a long day's drive, but those cozy familiar numbers, the ones whose magnitude we easily intuit, just don't do the job when it comes to a question about the yeast beaker.

In SilverSurfers I pulled one of those "I have never tried this before and maybe it will work" stunts, and got lucky. Again I put the yeast cells under the compound microscope; then I added a half drop of peroxide over at the edge of the cover slip, just to see if maybe we could see the cell's-eye view of last week's fizzy demo.

Here is the video. It speaks for itself.

A point of disagreement

Last week in the waiting room at dance school I had a conversation with a non-Primavera parent.

She is a home-schooler. She claimed to have borrowed ideas on science teaching from the Waldorf curriculum. (Not having read extensively on Waldorf, I don't know how accurately she represents their methods). She said she was intentionally postponing science curriculum until around 9 years old. She continued with an example: if your child sees a shooting star, and asks about it, then your accurate answer might "deaden" the subject by closing it off. And science as a whole was omitted in order to allow the child a few years of thinking about the universe in magical or imaginary ways.

She and a third parent chatted on about how they might avoid "deadening," yet still play out the shooting star question with a "what do YOU think" sort of approach. While I thought this had, as they say in those disastrous job reviews where you can kiss your raise goodbye, room for improvement (see end note), my mind was busy racing off on two tracks: on the one hand, trying to find the gentlest non-confrontational way to steer her to do better, and on the other hand trying to gauge how deeply I disagreed with her.

Forty-eight hours have passed, allowing me to conclude that I disagree fundamentally and viscerally. Let me count the ways:

1. An honest answer is not deadening
2. There's plenty of wonder to go around
3. You are starving your child
4. Magical thinking is a gigantic failure
5. There's plenty of imagining to do

1. An honest answer is not deadening

The real answer to what is in a shooting star is fascinating in all its details. It raises dozens of additional questions. It opens doors to understanding the universe in ways that never come up in daily life. A chunk of rock travels 100 million light years in total darkness! I never knew anything was so big! Or so many things lie hidden in the sky! It burns up? I never knew rock could burn! I never knew that air resistance, which I feel as gentle breeze, could grow so fierce!

2. There's plenty of wonder to go around

Go ahead and answer your child's question. Even if you satisfy her on the subject of shooting stars, I absolutely, positively, unconditionally guarantee she will be able to find more questions. She will not run out of wonder. Wonder does not have a Peak Oil moment. The supply of questions, and the supply of genuine mysteries to be asked about, will not diminish. As one of my professors cheerfully quipped, when an algorithm seemed to depend on finding and consuming ever huger numbers, "Don't worry. There are plenty more numbers."

Worse: if you dodge or refuse to answer about the shooting star, you are trying to create a sense of wonder by deliberately withholding information – like OPEC trying to increase oil prices by cutting off supply. Now you have created a type of wonder which is of limited supply, a sort of counterfeit wonder which runs out as soon as your control over the market weakens. A poor trade indeed, discarding the infinite for the artificially finite!

3. You are starving your child

Here at Primavera, the Question Box quietly invites the five- to seven-year-olds to ask questions. They respond with a never-ending river of questions. They want to know about plants, bugs, evolution, disease, death, stars, snakes, rocks, metals, fire, molecules, planets, electricity, machines, and rockets . . . and that's only in the first five minutes. They have a huge appetite for knowledge. Omit science from the curriculum, and you starve that appetite. A child grows complete and healthy on a balanced diet whose Food Groups include art, language, writing, social interaction, real world knowledge, story telling, and physical activity. Starve the mind of an entire food group, and expect to harm the growth of the whole.

4. Magical thinking is a gigantic failure

Some abilities come to us naturally. The ability to eat, and enjoy food; the ability to walk and run: we acquire these just by growing in a normal environment. The infant's drive for language acquisition seems to be hard-wired, as does the parents' complementary skill of language teaching.

Other abilities do not come naturally. For example, humans do not seem to have a built-in genetic tendency to read and write. Reading and writing are acquired because adults insist on their acquisition. We deliberately construct the rules, conditions, and actions that support reading and writing.

Scientific thinking is another ability which, uncultivated, can utterly fail to grow. Thousands of years' experience shows that people are quite able to get through life believing the earth is flat, stars are friendly spirits, diseases are caused by vapors, and so on; and they will fail to acquire – indeed, violently reject -- information that is acquired by other means, as witness Galileo's unpleasant experiences with the Inquisition.

Magical thinking, by contrast, seems to occur naturally. When you watch the football game, and clench your fists to give the quarterback extra strength for that critical throw, you are doing magical thinking! It's harmless in sporting events, and may serve nicely as a sort of social bonding technique ("we're all pulling together hoping Johnny passes his exam"). It has real uses, in storytelling, in facing and reconciling one's emotional states. But as a real world problem-solving technique, magical thinking fails over and over. It doesn't build better mousetraps, win or prevent wars, or cure disease (despite numerous attempts, the bubonic plague was never cured by murdering one's local population of Jews). And yet we see magical thinking all around us. My neighbor feels that global warming is probably just part of a natural cycle. Why does he think so? He just sort of feels it must be right. Worse yet, he votes based on his magical conclusions.

Children need to learn a method of thinking with inquiry, observation, and logic. Otherwise they risk growing into handicapped adults who support nutty political schemes, fall for Ponzi scams, buy products that fail to solve problems that didn't exist in the first place, and generally bring danger to themselves and others.

5. There's plenty of imagining to do

A passage from one of Maria Montessori's books explains the importance of imagining in the curriculum. She does not mean a day-dreamy sort of cotton candy and butterflies imagining. I have an uncle in America, she suggests. I have never seen either America or this uncle, but I use the facility of imagination to bring them both into my mind, and to build knowledge around these facts that I cannot observe directly. Imagination, combined with discernible rules about how the universe works, gives us the power to understand the world broadly and deeply: the Keys to the Universe.

Imagining, like wonder, does not have to be parcelled out, and does not have to be enhanced by deliberate ignorance. We do not need to imagine that maybe the shooting star is a sparkling fairy. We can imagine many real things about the shooting star, and we can extend our imagination with more questions – especially if we are confident our teachers will support us with all the knowledge we ask for.

- - - - - -

Endnote: "what do YOU think the shooting star is". This is an unfair response to the child. You are taunting her by refusing to divulge information. She does not know the answer, and she does not have a plausible way of guessing or inferring the answer. Your refusal to answer is like bringing dinner to table and then forcing the hungry child to wait, not allowed to eat until you finish your weird quiz game. Worse: by demanding an answer from her, you've suddenly put her under uncomfortable pressure -- even guaranteed her failure, because of course she has no way to provide the right answer.

We in Science Specialist class often respond to a question with "what do YOU think", but only in circumstances where the knowledge generally available, plus application of creative reasoning, might yield an answer: as in, "why do YOU think the dolphin needs to swim extremely fast?".

Experiments, quizzes and Pimsleur, and bubbles

The nematode experiment was a resounding failure. Remember we had these beneficial nematodes which are supposed to help gardeners by preying on grubs. So, I got two beakers, and dug up a couple grubs, and put one grub in each beaker (along with some vegetation and dirt), and then added nematodes to only one of the two beakers.

Both grubs died.

Learning opportunity: failed experiments are a constant in the scientific process. For every ingenious experiment that advances The Cause, there are hundreds that just fizzle out and fail to teach us anything at all. All this trying and failing is the creative process that leads you to devise a real winner of an experiment.
In response to this, we spent part of the class trying to think of better beneficial-nematode experiments. We didn't come up with anything so compelling that I want to rush ahead and try it, but the kids threw in some pretty good beginnings of ideas. We'll return to the subject next session.

Onward to the quizzes. Last year, when I wanted to learn some Arabic, I purchased the Pimsleur Method instructional CDs. One thing I noticed was that after they taught you a new word, they'd go off onto other content for about 90 seconds, and then ask you out of the blue to repeat the new word. You could just feel the darn thing trickling down the memory hole "dang it, they taught me how to say The Store Is Closed and I nearly forgot!" , and I'm sure the point of it was to catch that moment and cue your brain to transfer the word from short term to middle term to long term storage. (After the 90-second interval, they leave it for 180 seconds and then ask you again . . . etc)
With this in mind, we tried our first Science Test. Naturally this was nothing like those paper things with 100 multiple-choice and 50 short-answer questions, and all your prestige riding on the results. Think of Test as a synonym for Experiment. "Hey, let's do a brain experiment. I wonder how much is left in your brain from what we learned last week! Do you remember the part about the black holes or the sugar crystals or the intestinal cells? Was it trickling out the memory hole?"
Preliminary results:
1. We remember some very detailed information while at the same time totally losing other details. And I mean totally. Big, blank, empty space.
2. We remember some core concepts while at the same time totally losing other core concepts.
3. If student #1 remembers "A" but forgot "B", then student #2 might remember "B" but forget "A".
Interesting things, brains. You know that the ability to forget is essential to true intelligence, right? Collecting mountains of data is all very nice in its own way, but the real value is in organizing and structuring the data. Think of the last time you did a big garage organization project. Your most powerful ally? The trash can. The same is true of data in memory. Structuring requires weeding. And learning requires mistakes – such as overaggressive weeding of the data.

Of course we also had a fun demo. One of our Primavera parents led me to this one. (hint, hint: do you know a neat thing to do in a science class? Don't keep it secret) . This one is easy to do at home. Just throw some yeast into a bit of hydrogen peroxide. The yeast sets about destroying the (poisonous) peroxide, reducing it to oxygen and water. The sudden production of oxygen means . . . . BUBBLES ! . . . which means . .. WHOOPS OF JOY! For more spectacular bubbles, add a bit of soap before you add the yeast.

Nematode mania

Maybe somebody got a little tooo charged up about those nematodes. I came in armed with

• as requested by the class, etymology of the word nematode ("nema", thread: hence, "threadlike things"
  
• a dozen amazing nematode facts courtesy of UCal Berkeley via the www
  
• nematode anatomy information: musculature, neurophysiology, cell layers
  
• Electron microscope images of nematodes
  
• cross-section diagrams of nematodes at various points
  
• a box of actual nematodes from the garden store, plus microscope to look at them
  
  
  
  
• some actual grubs from my back yard, for an experiment, to see if the nematodes from the garden store will eat the grubs as advertised
  

Well, nobody complained about too much nematode content, although I fear the focus may have faded a bit by the end and I am not entirely sure how many of the class quite grasped that there was a controlled experiment being launched. I'm writing from on the road here so I haven't had a chance to check back. Like all real experiments, this one has a good chance of giving muddled and illegible results: like for example if my trusty helpers don't remember to water them and the grubs just all die of thirst whether they are in the "with nematodes" beaker or the "no nematodes" beaker.

As far as K class, I was even tempted to bring them a few hundred thousand nematodes too. Then I reflected, they haven't even seen The Invention (see post from a couple weeks ago), and we could have a pretty good thrill just looking at sugar and salt crystals in the stereomicroscope. Which we did.



The Question Box was so stuffed they hadn't even been able to cram more Question Cards into it! Is this a fabulous gang of kids or what? I emptied the box, and am saving the cards for posterity. I wonder if I can get these things bronzed.



No class 14 Nov (due to my travel) or 28 Nov (ditto).

Marbles, voice, creative thinking

Ever since one student asked in August "just what is electricity" I've been puzzling about how to make a demonstration. This week I brought in electricity demo v2 (version 1, in August, was really no good at all). In v2 I have routed out a shallow elliptical channel in a 2x12 wood plank. I load the channel with marbles, while explaining that copper atoms
(a) unlike hydrogen atoms, have a whole lot of electrons (29)
(b) are willing to share with their neighbors.
Then I claim that this heap of marbles shall represent electrons, and I kind of swirl them along so they go around the track.
I don't know.
Everybody was pretty nice about going along with it, and nobody complained. I feel like taking a survey

As to that demo - - would you say
(a) Wow! I like totally understand electricity now
(b) I guess there's sort of a connection. Thanks for trying.
(c) Can we play marbles now?

The creative input from the younger members of Team Science was superb. The question box in K included

What does the inside of a tree trunk look like

which is just the perfect question to ask of a guy who has arrived in class lugging a huge section of 12x2 pine ! Not only did we have the chance to discuss annual rings, but the various surfaces on the plank offer an interesting lesson in 3D geometry, if you try to realize that the straight lines on one face have a connection to the circular lines on another face.

I have to bring that plank back in and leave it for closer inspection.

Over in Silver Surfers it was a pretty busy class as we had a repeat of the electricity marbles, plus a discussion about nematodes (there are a lot of them. everywhere) (yes, they are really tiny. and that imposes serious constraints on their complexity. No eyes, nose, mouth. No hands, arms, heart, lungs. No brain!). The discussion was very lively and I had to cut it off because I was eager to cram a third item into the agenda. But I will be back with more nematode mania next week.

Following up on a question about how voice boxes work, I brought in a sound-making device consisting of a piece of dried plant stem and a brass tube. The idea was to show that the mouthpiece alone makes a plain squawk (just as your voicebox makes a plain undifferentiated noise) and the brass tube allows us to refine and shape the sound (just as your mouth shapes the voice into speech sounds). Fortunately one of our creative thinkers caught me before class and said "are you going to play a Halloween song on that thing?" and I said, "Can you tell me please what is a Halloween song", and so she hinted at one, so later I did exactly what she said and that turned a simple science demo into a great big classroom hit! Thanks!

( no class 24 Oct)

No class - - schedule conflict - - we knew this would happen occasionally - -

10,000 things to do with a peanut

In the K class we did an actual experiment. Often we do demonstrations, which people who are not careful about language may misidentify as experiments. I figure if I already know how it's going to come out, it's not an experiment. I also think people get through school with absolutely no idea how hard it is to do an experiment, or how valuable it is; and I blame this partly on sloppy use of the word experiment to describe any mundane exercise they happen to be assigned on an average school afternoon. Real experiments are often hard to design, chaotic, and tend to collapse into a chaos of illegible results on the first dozen tries. Real experiments are driven by a maddened curiosity that simply will not let you quit trying until you get some kind of answer.
What's that? Step off what? Oh. That soapbox. Under my feet.
Okay.
The experiment concerned a child's question about the smartness of birds. As an example of how smart birds (especially corvids) are, consider the stashing behavior of the Pinon Jay.


Every year the pinon trees release a huge yield of pinon nuts (AKA pignolia nuts at Central Market) in a short season, and the jays have to make that food last all year. What they do is hide the seeds, one by one, until after a few weeks' work they have stashed some ten thousand seeds in ten thousand hiding places in the landscape. Months later, when they are hungry, they actually remember where each seed is hidden. Experiments have shown that they do not just go on random searches. They know exactly where to go when they need a snack.
So, my experiment was on human intelligence. I gave one child a peanut, and asked him to hide it. Then we chatted about something else, like comets or dolphins. I asked the child to go find the hidden peanut, and he remembered where it was. I gave the next child three peanuts to hide. We chatted about something else, like the inside of the sun. I asked the child to go find the three peanuts, and he remembered all three. The next child hid nine peanuts. As soon as she was done, I asked her to go get all nine. She showed considerable difficulty, and relied on associative clues (" . . I have no idea . . I think there was one over here somewhere . . wait, I remember it had something to do with the trash can . . YES now I remember, it was behind the trash can. . "). In the end she retrieved eight of nine. So the experiment shows that human five- and six- year olds are very clever indeed, even if they can't quite match what a jay can do.
At this point we have three children who have received peanuts, and a dozen feeling a bit left out. This is where one child suggested I give one (1) peanut to absolutely everybody, which shows that human five- and six- year olds are also creative and empathetic, and explains that peanut you found in the lunchbox that afternoon.





In Silver Surfers, I brought along some specimens for the compound microscope. I am very pleased with my invention (see last week) and wanted to just look at . . well . . stuff. The big hit of the day was this nematode


found in a bit of sludge from my compost bin. We also looked at blood (mine) (I have a glucose test kit which makes it easy) and onion skin (of course). The enthusiasm was delightful. Do microscopes make learning fun? No. Learning is already fun, and microscopes let you do it.

Invention! Also, Inside story, with poll

The big deal for Silver Surfers was my New Invention



What, you ask, is that thing? It's an adapter that lets me plop the digital camera onto the microscope, perfectly aligned, and leave it there, hands free. This not only frees my hands to move specimens around, it also ends the annoying wobble of a handheld camera. In the case of high magnification, handheld wasn't just difficult: it was impossible. But now - - O delight - - we can use the compound microscope in class, showing the specimens on the big screen TV!



The new stereomicroscope has some prodigious powers of magnification, as shown in this progressive series zooming in on a zinnia.












I am having some trouble getting the images correct on the TV. I think the microscope light is too intense, and the TV tends to flare to all red. I need to try the low-power setting on the light source.

Silver Surfers were also dispatched to do The Weighing Work, with my little digital scale.

The big deal for the K class was our formerly out sick student was back again so I could do the demo that had been secretly planned the previous week. He had submitted a huge heap of questions all of the form

What does the inside of _____ look like?

The Science answer is

I dunno. Let's go find out!

He had asked (among other things) about the insides of electrical cords, batteries, and hearts.
We cut open an electrical cord with a stern advance warning of Do NOT Try This At Home.
We cut open a battery



with a sterner advance warning of Do NOT Try This At Home, reinforced by the vivid example of Your Science Specialist wearing goggles and gloves, and newspaper carefully spread out to a great distance, and the follow up of Your Science Specialist cleaning the site twice just to be sure of complete hazmat removal. Notice also, in the photo, that the battery crud seems to have eaten a hole in the newspaper. Yummy!
In the process we discover another Science answer

Well that's pretty interesting, but now there's more I don't know

Like, what's the gray goop? What's the black goop? Why a wire attached to one end and not the other? ( "One is zinc and the other is copper", a student cheerfully informs me. By now I have learned to take this stuff in stride when it come to Primavera students, and I wouldn't even have blinked if he started telling me that anodes oxidize and cathodes reduce).
As for hearts, why, they're available at your local HEB in the beef section. They seem to consist mostly of . . . well . . . meat, with a hollow spot for the heart chamber. Advance notice was provided, whereby those who felt that hacking up meat in science class was a little too gross could move to a quiet table at a safe distance.
Another Science answer here is

Things are what they are

You may find it gross or creepy, but it was there, and it was the way it was, before you looked at it; it will be that way after you are done looking at it; in between, the choice to open or close your eyes is your own.

Feel free to vote in the poll (at the right hand side of the screen)

Drama and neurons

Hokay yall just a short entry to beat the 168-hour deadline.

I experienced a perils-of-teaching drama in (K). I had a whole bunch of demo stuff lined up in response to a persistent line of questioning from one student. Then, to my horror, he is out sick! What to do? I don't want him to miss all the features that were created with him in mind! We did a bunch of Question Box questions and I carefully tap danced around the missing demo - - I think they forgave me.

Silver Surfers got to build their neurons (with brown dendrites and brass axons)

and had a followup on Temperature, and why we have both Fahrenheit and Celsius scales. I think the abstraction of two numbering systems was a little lost on the class, but we had a nice time naming things that are hot, Very Hot, Very VERY Hot, medium, cold, and outrageously cold.
The one and only (ulp) question box entry was about human evolution, which worked best when we shrunk it down to a question of why are Big Brains a selective advantage? (I found that if you include furlessness, upright posture, and other traits - - then the whole conversation just gets too lumpy).

Moons to Shrooms

The K class was brimming over with their usual enthusiasm. This week's demo was my lovely digital kitchen scale. I left the scale in the classroom so everybody has the chance to weigh things all week long. Classical Montessori apparatus includes a traditional two-pan balance (with a collection of 1g,5g… weights), so you get a sense of how the measuring is done. By contrast the digital scale just gives you an answer by what appears to be magic. There are lessons in this, too, such as: working with good equipment allows you to collect data quickly, so you get lots of data, which can lead you to ask more and harder questions; but you also have to accept a certain level of mystery about how your gear really works.
The biggest discussion topic was the moon, and why it appears light to us, and why it has phases. I claimed that the sun's light bounces off the moon to us, which was received fairly well, although there was a determined minority opinion that the moon was lighting the sun. I didn't specifically disagree with this, because it could be a syntax issue (somebody who really meant to say the moon Is Lit By The, but the words come out as the moon Lights Up The. English is a very tricky language). I did draw a nice big diagram with rays of light zooming all over space. Astute helpers insisted I also add the lightness and darkness on earth.
Somebody interjected a question about asteroids, which I thought was going to give us an elegant segue to How Did Dinosaurs Become Extinct which has been languishing unanswered in the question box due to lack of time. The segue was not to be, because everybody had $0.02 to chip in about the moon, its movement, and light. It was a shock to realize we had run out the clock when we were all having so much fun. I know in show biz you're supposed to leave 'em wanting more, but this was more like "I can't stop the express train". We even had one very upset student who felt he just couldn't go home without getting his chance to comment. Fortunately, we're talking Primavera here, not Just Any School. His Guide managed to find me after Silver Surfer class so we could have a little Science Supplemental. To us big people, it's just one additional minute off the clock - - say hello, listen as the child expresses his way of visualizing the sun and moon. To the child: it is the difference between squelch ("Science Guy has gone for the day. Fuhgeddaboudit") and respect ("I can see this is important to you. I'll go get him").

In Silver Surfer I hoped to continue the winning streak with You Can Model Anything With Styrofoam Balls. But, alas, we were sunk by what I call non-point-source noise pollution. You've heard of non-point-source water pollution, where the bit of antifreeze on your driveway mixes with a bit of diazinon from your neighbor's lawn, and a camera battery that your other neighbor's F10 ran over, and the collective effect is some truly nasty runoff water in the creek despite the lack of a single major polluter. Sometimes in class each of us has just one teeny little harmless sentence to murmur to our pal, not enough to really disrupt anything, just a clever insight, or something so funny it couldn't wait - - and the collective effect of ten of these is an impenetrable wall of sound. Well, it happened, and unfortunately we lost so much time that the demo got killed by the clock. Ouch. I guess we should start with it next session.
I heard that quite a number of students did their Temperature Measuring worksheets. I'll have to catch them in one-on-one sidebar time and see their results.
I offered the Mushroom Challenge. Our classroom has a new field guide to the fungi. I brought in photos of a mushroom I found,

and photos of one that a student found last year. The challenge is to find the names of these mushrooms in the field guide. I think the 6-8 age range is when we just start getting into this frame of mind where we enjoy examining (and mentally cataloging) every single page of a reference-type text. Next week I get to find out who succeeded.
New library books: one on brains/nerves, and one about germs and plagues.

Curiosity

Styrofoam balls again! Everyone in K built a spider. Key points:

• Eight legs
  
• Two body segments, the cephalothorax and the abdomen. As of last Wednesday, everybody in K can say "cephalothorax"
  
• Lots of eyes
  

I also brought in my nice cattleya plant from home, just because it's nice to look at, and also in case the concept of epiphytes might be a conversation starter. It wasn't, but everybody liked smelling the flowers.



Naturally the cattleya and spider-building had to be squeezed in around the corners as your star questioners had all sorts of things they wanted to ask about, including a big agenda of How Much Does x Weigh.

Over in Silver Surfers, the Question Box suddenly and delightfully kicked into high gear, yielding great heaps of questions. There was widespread interest in how brains work, and how large they are, and whether they are made of chunks, and if so how large are the chunks. I diagrammed a neuron with the usual dendrites and axons, and some suggestions about learning as synapse formation. (Segues on brain lesions, electricity, size and quantity of cells . . .)

Intriguing meta-question from the audience: "How can we not know how brains work? They're right here and available for inspection all the time, and we use them constantly!". As always, I have forgotten the wording of the question, so it comes back to you in fully analytical adult language. One of these days I will learn to transcribe, or memorize, or record, questions as asked. In the meantime, this becomes a cognitive-science observation. I remember the question with perfect accuracy in terms of what did she want to know and what did she ask for, but have no record of either the words or the sounds and phonemes that were used. This tells us something about what brains do and do not store.
Also essential in the brain discussion is the we do not know part of it. Key messages for Science Specialist class are

• Nobody knows the answer to that (I'm not just hiding the answer, and it doesn't mean there is something wrong with your question)
  
• This doesn't mean a dead end to your question. You could even make it your work - - later - - to find the answer. Although I cannot fulfil your request for knowledge today, you can see that as an opportunity rather than a setback.
  

Between that and the other questionBox contents, and some logistics around the orchid ("I can't smell the flower yet! ! Bring it closer! !") we actually ran through the whole time available without getting to Demonstration. I take this as a sign of success, when curiosity and participation are pumped up to this level.
The pre-class sidebar time worked well, too, as a child had the opportunity to ask me about What Do Germs Look Like. I sketched for him an e. coli , a staphylococcus, and a spirochete. The fact that we were not in circle makes the conversation very tightly connected, as computer guys say, and I think he is therefore more attentive to His Personal Answer. Also, we attract eavesdroppers like fruitflies to a banana. "What's going on here? I want to know too! Let me see!" Which is a fine way for learning to happen.

100%

In K class, I got to complete the ice-water-steam-vapor demonstration that was cut off due to lack of time the week before. The demo gets more exciting when you show that "other things also have solid and liquid states". To do this, you melt some butter (smells nice), then you get out your pocket butane torch and melt some solder, which is an eye-opener for somebody who's never seen metal turn runny, and drip and splash.
We also talked about lava and spiders.
Lava and spiders?
Sure, great combination.
Actually it was mostly about spiders, and the lava is more like a universal constant - - everybody loves lava, you can talk about it at any time of day or night, and kind of weave it into unrelated conversations. Would you like Corn Flakes or Cheerios? I'd like Corn Flakes, with molten lava please.
The spider discussion - - launched by one question in the question box - - achieved a marvellous 100% participation rate. Sometimes I think that you are wondering, does my child participate in these science fandangoes? In this case, the answer is yes because absolutely everybody had at least one question or a comment. 100%.
A remarkable question during the Q&A concerned whether spiders are reptiles. That might sound odd, but it gets interesting when you hear the full question as asked:

Since spiders lay eggs, does that mean they are reptiles?

Now we see that the questioner is thinking really hard, and very rationally. I want to construct large sweeping rules of categorization! I have data, but I need more data! How significant is egg-laying as a classifier?

For Silver Surfers we had an action dramatization of the role of blood in the body. As a blood cell, I ran around the circle of body cells (the role of body cell was excellently played by a cast of Silver Surfers), and brought needed cell nutrition (represented by peanuts) to the cells, and took away metabolic waste (represented by peanut shells). I also handed out a few choice oxygen molecules (the ubiquitous styrofoam balls) to those cells that needed them.
I wonder if I could make like a leitmotif of always including at least one styro ball in every class.
Science as conceptual/performance art.
Maybe Yoko would be interested.
Did the action drama work? Do all the students suddenly understand blood circulation? Let me know if any clues pop out. Sometimes we find out many months later, when a remark pops out of the blue "sure, Mom, I know what blood does. It carries food just like our science specialist handing out peanuts!"

Insect blood (or, hemolymph anyway) is quite different. For one, it doesn't actually flow in tubes. It just slops around. So you'll never see an insect as big as a Golden Retriever because the system for getting nutrition to cells is just not good enough. As we say in computer science, it's not scalable. For another thing, insect hemolymph does not carry oxygen. At all. It's just not in the job description.

Scientist in the Crib

I love this gem from The Scientist in the Crib. While most of the book is about babies, here's a paragraph about adults:

When we look attentively, carefully, and thoughtfully at the things around us, they invariably turn out to be more interesting, more orderly, more complex, more strange, and more wonderful than we would ever have imagined. That's what happened when Kepler looked carefully at the stars, when Darwin looked at finches, when Marie Curie looked at pitchblende ore.

now put it ALL together . . .

And it's also what happened when Jane Austen looked at a provincial village and Proust looked at a Madeleine cookie, when Vermeer looked at a girl making lace, and Juan Gris looked at a café table.

. .. yeah

Alex the Parrot, 1976 - 2007

Sad news of the death of Alex the parrot.

I found the link where you can watch Alex do some of his feats of cognition. (Scroll down in the page until you find ENTERTAINING PARROTS).

. . .of many things. . .

The K class had so many questions, and stayed so attentive to the exegesis, we just about ran out of time without getting to the official Weekly Demo. Water, ice, and vapor, that was supposed to be the demo material: but by the time I realized the half hour had flown by, I felt a little foolish with my compressed demo which seemed to have melted down to "here's an ice cube. gotta go".
Let's see, how did this come about? I brought in two Rhinoceros books from the library. (They're available right now in the classroom). I don't know what thoughts go through your mind when you first glance at the cover photo on a rhino book. Perhaps "boy, he's big" or "I wonder what lens they used", or "was it dangerous trying to get just the right angle?". In this class, at least two alert observers burst out with "he is DIRTY!". We had a marvellous time speculating on reasons why rhinoceros might want to be dirty (or, more properly, would benefit from being dirty), might go out of their way to get really properly gunked up. We imagined them after a heavy rainfall, discovering with horror that their skin had been washed - - ugh! - -fresh and clean. So. If any of your kindergarteners have been showing bizarre attitudes about bath, or have been rolling in dust outside, you know whom to blame.
After that excitement settled, we took up How Far Away Are The Stars, which is a delicious opportunity to introduce the speed of light. I must say these K kids do ask splendid questions.

Over in Silver Surfers, I thought I'd offer a demo in measuring temperature -- I got a nice Celsius thermometer last year off Craig's list, and have been waiting for a chance to share it, and it seemed like something that could be tinkered with during the whole week. But somehow, here too, we ran out of time. As followup to last week's methane molecule (you know, methane is the main ingredient in natural gas) I brought in a pocket propane torch ("it's not methane, which I don't own a tank of, but it's close"). Methane is actually odorless, and Texas Gas Service adds a stinky perfume to it so you'll notice a gas leak before your house blows up. It turns out that pocket propane torches also have an absolutely vile stink added. And would everybody in the class like to smell the stink? Oh YESsss! EEE-eeew!
Before the whole stinky-propane routine there was a good deal of buzz over this little guy that a student brought in - -






is this a leech? If he's a leech he should have itty bitty eyes at the front end, and I can't find any. He's not one of the plain-dark-brown type leech. But there are lots of leech species. Are there lots in Texas? Guides to the (cute and cuddly) segmented worms of Texas don't seem to be so easy to find. The leech topic, though, dominated conversation for some time even after we had (or thought we had) moved on to other topics. Leeches, insect blood, bilirubin - - hmm - - we have a theme here. So far nobody has volunteered to be the leech's dinner. (Parental permission would be required for this experiment).

Now about sidebar discussions. It's a really promising opportunity we have this year. Per the official schedule I arrive in the Silver Surfer classroom about 10-15 minutes before Science Circle time. Writer's workshop is proceeding, and students have the choice to continue writing or come chat quietly with me if they want. Chat, that is to say devour information at high speed. I look forward to some fascinating sessions here. Not much happened this week in pre-circle sidebar time, but I was lucky to have a student come to me after class to ask Who Was The First Human. (I predict this question will be asked at least twice per year by every class). We stepped away from Music Circle to talk about how gradual change accumulates to huge change, the sorites paradox, and reasons why some information from the past is unobtainable. But oh! the delight of watching those 7 year old eyes staring intently, the mind testing new ideas, appraising them, working to understand them, starting to register the endless implications - - what a beautiful sight!

Let's all build molecules

You probably noticed the little construction of styrofoam and toothpicks that came home with your child.
The K class all built little water molecules (you only need three styrofoam balls) in what has become a perennial favorite science class exercise. Of course somebody eventually notices that the water molecule looks like Mickey Mouse, and hilarity ensues.
I figured the Silver Surfers needed a bigger challenge so we made methane molecules (CH4). Ideally these are built with perfect symmetry, so the molecular shape marks the vertices of a tetrahedron.

The K class rewarded me with a great heap of Questions in the Question Box. Rhinoceros, squirrels, fish, and the End Of The Earth were among the topics. Silver Surfers had kind of a slow start as far as the supply of questions.

Don't tell them I said so, but the worm that spent the week in K looked to me, uh, shall I say, health-challenged. It also did not appear to have eaten any of its newspaper (for all I know they need the paper to soften for a month or something before they can really devour it). The interesting thing was that the students dutifully recorded day after day (on the observation log) that some of the paper had been eaten. This case of observation-by-wishful-thinking reminds me of Langmuir's discussion of pathological science. That's not a topic for lower elementary, where we do better to apply positive reinforcement to the right sort of enquiry rather than deep critique of error; so I simply smiled and thanked them for their diligence, and brought the long-travelling worm – who perhaps should be named Laika -- home for a decent burial.

I had tried to build a sort of trough or channel to help visualize electricity (balls rolling in a circular path) for my deep-fundamental-question-asker in SilverSurfers. This apparatus showed, to be charitable, sub-optimal functioning. In a way that's a lesson too - - or it will be, if I can figure out how to build a better one (for under ten dollars and in less than four hours). "We tried this in the laboratory several ways and at last were rewarded with success". Also nice would be a way to show energy being captured out of the stream of (balls) (electrons). I tried to build a sort of water-wheel and it was so miserable I didn't even bring it in. (The trough was made of paper-towel tubes. I know, not so great – but the price is unbeatable).
Hmm… with a milling machine I could make an excellent trough in under an hour and under ten dollars. But I'd need the thousand-dollar tool first. Or a router. Yeah. "Honey, I really have been needing a router for a long time anyway".

22 Aug: First class, microscope, worms

Well, I think that went reasonably well. The K class seems to be about as eager and excited and friendly a batch of li'l angels as anybody could ask for. I introduced them to the Question Box. If you have questions, any science questions, at any time, sez I, you write them down and put them in the box.

But I don't know how to write! says one very frank boy.

You will, startlingly soon, says the silent internal answer. Out loud, I said, "in that case, you simply ask for help from a teacher".

Last year's microscope has moved to the K class. For the 1st/2nd grade we have a new used microscope with a little wheel you turn to flip thru several power settings. It goes from about 4x up to 56x in a five settings. Not quite a zoom, but pretty nifty nevertheless. Both classes got a bit of focussing practice. I can point my digital camera at the microscope, and then run a USB::RCA wire from the camera to a TV set, and so everybody can see the microscope image at the same time, while a helpful volunteer twiddles the knob and we see the image improve from this



to this



I brought in a bunch of worms from my Can-o-worms ™ worm composting habitat. One of the worms is spending the week in the K classroom, where we are watching to see if he will devour the bit of newspaper I put in with him (my home worms eat quite a lot of newspaper as well as egg cartons and kitchen scraps).

Science Specialist v2.0

Welcome, new readers and old. So, a new year of classes begins. This year there are two science classes instead of just one. I get to meet a whole batch of children who've never seen a Question Box before; and a whole batch of veterans who have already fine-tuned their "stump the band" techniques and will surely come up with deeper and more difficult puzzlers.
With the older group I get an extra 15 minutes each week before Science Cirle for informal sidebars and one-on-one Q&A. I think this might give us marvellous opportunities to dig in deeper on subjects that happen to catch just one child's interest, or subjects where just a few are ready to tackle the advanced ideas.

I confess a few pre-show jitters. Right now they manifest as a nervous feeling that "they've seen it all already", and this year's demos and questions can't maintain last year's pace of spectacle and astonishment. Of course the truth is that the world just doesn't run out of fascinating things. To prove this, try tuning in to the Guaranteed All New Entertainment Nature Channel at any time. All you have to do is pick an outdoor place – any outdoor place – and go, and pick a nice spot, and stand or sit, and wait. Wait a little more. And watch. It's guaranteed: something nifty and original will show up. It might be a bird, or a neat bug, or some strange dirt, or a way that a tree is growing . . . you have to watch carefully. But there will be something. Free entertainment! No ads!
Come to think of it, the same thing works with the amazing Guaranteed All New Children Channel too. All I have to do is get into the classroom, start watching and listening to the children, and they will reliably come up with something nifty and original.

Hokay . . . here comes Wednesday . . . we'll see.

OMG! It's a TEST!

There was a caterpillar and a test.

Like the turtle, the caterpillar gave a fine lesson in patient observation. If you glance at him for a minute, he's just a green lump with spots. When you relax and let things take their course, you see his fascinating ways of moving around, and his erratic but ultimately succesful search-and-forage strategies; and you start to wonder all sorts of things about him: his diet, his age, his changes in size, his metabolism.

And, yes, there was a test on the last day of class. And, yes, papers were handed out and students wrote answers and returned the papers. Still, I wouldn't say I gave a test so much as I did a test.
This is, after all, a science class; and one of the investigative topics is

How much do the children learn? What sort of things do they remember best?

As an experiment (a test if you will) to investigate this topic, I gave them questions along the lines of

What was your favorite science demonstration this year

I got an interesting experimental result right away. The older group all plunged straight into the assignment with enthusiasm. However, in the younger group, 83% simply did not want to do the exercise at all; the other 17% struggled for awhile but didn't get much further than writing a name at the top. (This was presented, Montessori-style, as "a Work you might like to do", so a simple choice not to participate carries no negative meaning).

Looking back at the year, I made a partial list of demonstrations we did. In no particular order,

dry ice, hydrocholoric acid, bird poop caterpillar, turtle, iceberg, flatworm, microscope on TV, mini mushrooms, butt skin, petrified wood, ammonite/trilobite, electric circuits, electric flow thru salt water, skit of electric circuit w/ styro ball electrons, rock/mineral scratch test, candle/carbon dioxide, chromatography, molecular models (wood), molecular model (styro), boiling/freezing water, melting metal, solar system scale model, mold on sour cream, skit of being the tallest tree, flashlight/eclipse, skit of being photons.

I have all the Question Cards saved. In my spare time I need to make a list of those, which are closer to the heart of the Science Specialist Experience.

Parental Questions and suggestions are also welcomed at all times. You know how to reach me.

Anyway, everybody got a certificate (you probably saw one). As my old logic professor said, "everybody gets an A". A finer classroom full of brilliant engaged questioning enthusiastic creative insightful students was never seen, nor is likely to be. Thank you for sending them to us. This is Science Specialist, signing off until August. Good night, and good luck.

Spectacularly bad timing, but fun anyway

Looking around for a Fascinating Demo, I decided to try bringing in some dry ice, or as I prefer to call it, frozen Carbon Dioxide.

As I'm proudly unveiling my little stroke of genius, there's some rumble around the room about "already seen this". It seems I'm the only guy on the planet who doesn't know about the very gracious class grandfather (UT Physics prof) who visited just yesterday. He had frozen CO2. He had liquid oxygen. He had liquid nitrogen. He had a whole Physics Circus. Oh boy. Here I am with my little sack of dry ice from HEB. Yesterday's Physics Circus included demonstration involving balloons. And guess what's in my hip pocket: a sack of party balloons.

I don't know when I've had worse timing than this.

Well, we went on with the show anyway – after all, dry ice is fascinating enough to see more than once. Also, as far as I could tell, my little demo (fill a test tube with dry ice. Stretch a balloon over the top. Watch the balloon expand as the CO2 turns from solid to gas) was actually not something that had been done the day before.

It worked.

The balloon inflated so well, we segued to an unplanned second demonstration. I tied off the CO2-inflated balloon, then carefully inflated another balloon to exactly the same size. Of course CO2 is heavier than air, so the balloons should not weigh the same. Drop them from 6 feet up at the same time, and the CO2 balloon reaches the floor first!

I like it as a demonstration, even if it totally sabotages what they're going to hear about Galileo and the leaning tower of Pisa next year.

Questions are thinning out. I think everybody has End Of Year- osis. (Senior Slump?) . There were two about "why is [other student's name] so nice", which I considered mangling into a whole session on Altruism and evolution - - having just finished reading The Selfish Gene, complete with its startlingly optimistic chapter on the evolutionary basis for trust and cooperation. Maybe next year.

Hazmats

(Class of weds 2 May)

There's been a steady level of interest in rocks and fossils, chert and flint. Reading up on these, I stumbled on an interesting tidbit of information: limestone, when you add hydrochloric acid, should fizz. That sounds like good demo material! sez I, and immediately rummage for the concentrated hydrochloric acid, which is in the garage of course (you can buy it at professional plumbing supply houses under the brand name Vanisol).
I also figured this was a good time to show the similarity between shell and limestone, so now I had two things to douse with acid. And every experiment needs a control, so I also got a chunk of granite. Also a nice chunk of deer bone from the back acreage, because you might wonder Is Bone The Same As Shell?
I was not too excited about the idea of bringing concentrated acid into a kindergarten classroom, though, which is where the TeeVee and digicam come to the rescue. I could do all the dousing and fizzing at home, take little bitty movies on the digicam, and then pipe them into the class TV and show everybody!

It worked! So we had Home Movies of Science Demo.

I suppose I could post the actual movies but they add up to about 200MB. Suffice it to say, the limestone and shell both fizzed gratifyingly and then dissolved away to absolutely nothing. The bone (which was one of those old white dry things that look like they've been there an awfully long time) didn't fizz (it's CaPO4, not CaCO3), but interestingly enough after awhile it mostly dissolved but left behind a little gummy mass which was obviously the protein portion - - even after a few seasons of ants and bacteria and rain and drought, there was a good deal of protein intermixed with the mineral part of the bone. Whadda ya know - - next time you're lost in the wilderness, don't turn your nose up at old bones!

Observation sheets bomb; Bird poops everywhere

Well, those optimistically prepared Observation Sheets did not turn out exactly as we hoped. I may have anticipated a troop of field biologists, each bringing me a weighty notebook bursting with sketches of new species. In fact there were only two sheets filled out at all.
So, the Observation Sheets were a successful experiment.
Remember the case of my friend Mike. His team had finished six months of hard work on a massive new software release. They offered it to a separate group for a week-long testing session. After a week of pounding and pummelling, the testers could not find a single defect. Hmmm, grumbles Mike, that was a really bad week. All that time expended and we didn't find any defects?
The launch of Observation Sheets has, by contrast, been an excellent experiment.
When you have new data, and you want to know what it meant or what to do about it, one thing to do is create a LOT of explanations. Later you can throw out all the ones that don't work.
Let's see.
The level of returns was low because . . .

• Data recording is too advanced for 6- year olds
  
• You have to offer the exercise more than once, or otherwise publicize and encourage it
  
• Data recording misses the point, because it does not add to the child's experience. Asking for a written followup just adds overhead to what would otherwise be the pure excitement of learning and discovery
  
• Data recording must be taught by example. You need to be right there with (just one or three) children and a caterpillar (not in Science Circle), and say "heeey, here's how I would write a Caterpillar Observation Sheet. Do you want to try one while I try one?".
  
• [ your hypothesis here ]
  
• ..
  

There's also the story of the baseball scout who discovers a new pitcher on a college team. The pitcher throws a perfect game. Not only are there no runs, hits, or errors, but in fact he strikes out every batter. On three pitches. In fact, no batter even made contact with the ball except for a single foul ball in the seventh inning. The scout phones his boss in wild excitement. The response: "Forget about this pitcher. We already have pitchers. But for crying out loud get me the name of the fellow who hit the foul ball!"

Which brings me to the two Observation Sheets that did get filled in. There was not a word about caterpillars or snail eggs on them. They were instead filled with questions. Lots and lots of questions. Beautifully written. One sheet held as many questions about sharks as could possibly be crammed onto a page. And the "your sketch here" boxes were filled with shark pictures.
There's something good here. Let me take awhile to figure out what it is.

My Discovery To Share was a caterpillar that looks like Bird Poop. All our young scientists were able to explain immediately and enthusastically why looking like Bird Poop has positive survival benefit if you are a caterpillar. They went on to point out that, if you are such a caterpillar, and you move around too fast at the wrong moment, you have wrecked your disguise.
Here's the bird poop caterpillar happily chomping on my kumquat tree. Click on the photo to zoom in for a closer view.

Kid Science Humor: The day after this class, a handful of students saw me on the school yard and called me excitedly. "Come over here! We've found a caterpillar!". When I went over to see, they showed me . . a genuine bird poop. Guffaws were shared all around.

My Dear Watson, Do Not Just Look: Instead, Observe

Caterpillars have been appearing all over, and Montessori students have been capturing them and examining them and sharing them.
I found a very nice field guide to caterpillars at our beloved public library, and brought it in. It is on the classroom Library Books shelf. Also, I have offered Observation Sheets to those who want to make a record of what they found. The idea is that when you fill out a sheet like this (answering a few boilerplate questions, making a sketch from nature, and composing comments or observations of your own), you sharpen your observation skills.





There are more observation sheets over near the microscope, where we have a batch of snail eggs quietly developing in a jar of water. You could in theory fill out a new sheet every couple of days, as these eggs will look different every time you come back to them. Snail eggs are completely transparent and you can see the embryonic snail as it develops from a simple yellow dot to a comma to a squiggly thing to an actual snail.

Dang, that's a big turtle

Sometimes in science you just put down all the textbooks and the questions and the hypotheses and the reasoning, and just enjoy looking at something.
Sometimes you get the best discoveries that way.

Shortly before class I was on my way to the pond to look for something interesting to bring in, and hey presto! there was this whopper of a turtle walking across the field.

We had the usual Questions and Discoveries and so forth, but the turtle in the center of Classroom Circle was pretty much the whole class. A subliminal lesson was: sometimes you have to wait, quietly, for something to happen, and your patience is rewarded. In this case, of course, what you wait for is the turtle deciding to come out of its shell and start moving.

"Although alarmed, the students did not panic as the monstrous beast approached."

Questions, Pond Life, Irony

Yes. Fresh questions in a fresh empty Question Box. It's working!

We began with our Snail Shell question person of last week. Pleased to see she remembers asking the question. Remembers? One might say, Is Very Persistent. This reminds me of an episode I saw a couple years ago that really impressed me. Primavera Primary Kid #1, we'll call him Johnny, has done something that really annoyed Primavera Primary Kid #2, whom we'll call Sally. Knocked over her dolls, or punched her, I don't remember. Anyway Sally knows the Primavera Peacemaking Rules. She has a right to say her piece, and by gosh Johnny is gonna hear it. She's after him. Johnny's taking evasive action, trying to hide behind the swing set, but Sally's not having any of that. She's gonna track him down like Javert until she gets her chance to say "when you punched me, you really hurt my feelings". She persists, and - - with or without help from the Guide - - she corners him and has a conversation. After which, the incident is closed, and I don't think Johnny punched her again after that.
Our peacemaking kids - - they're tough. Don't cross them.
Where was I?
Oh. Tenacious. Our very tenacious Snail Girl was right on the spot making sure I remembered her Snail Shell question. Yes, she got her Snail Shell answer, plus two shiny Snail Books from the library just in case. Actually she was not fully content with the answer so she asked again the next day to make sure. Persistent! Excellent!

Also in response to fresh new questions, I brought in an iceberg (okay, my iceberg was only eight inches across, and I made it myself in the freezer) to illustrate how the Titanic could have whanged into the underwater portion of the iceberg without actually reaching the visible part.
Also, because of the Leeches issue of a few weeks ago, I had tried to catch a leech in the pond near my house. I thought I had one – a quarter inch long, wiggly and stretchy, but on closer examination via the microscope he proved not to be a leech. Naturally we rigged up the microscope => camera => TV system to show him off in class as he swam around in his dixie cup. Here are a few snapshots of the Primavera Platyhelminth:

Here's an item I didn't have time to show off in class - - I just like it. You know those mats of sort of slimy algae at the sunny end of the pond? Here's what they look like up close.

I noticed an irony about the classroom, and the issue of order and decorum. At some point there seems to be a level of excitement which makes it impossible (impossible, that is, if your first initial is not "D") to rein the room back to silence. What I finally pieced together was: though I end the class wondering why things seem to have been driven slightly out of control, the irony is that I spent the preceding 44 minutes deliberately trying to get everybody excited!

A minor correction

(3-28-07) Well, that's what they call it in the stock market when the thrill ride pauses for a week. A correction. And in a sense we had an intentional course correction. Somewhere in the midst of all the exciting demonstrations we were so busy blowing things up that we never had time to open the Question Box. Big mistake. Because guess what is the real source for good demos? Yeah.
In that regard the Coke/Mentos demo was definitely off course. Anyway, entirely by design we had a session with no particularly dramatic demos. (I did bring in an actual I-found-it-myself-not-from-a-store fossil, from the creek behind Dittmar Rec Center). What we need here is to get back to the questions. So today's agenda was to dig out the entries languishing in the question box. Some of these were unfortunately getting pretty old. I don't want to have an Average Response Time in excess of about 13 days. Not good for the Question Box.
Questions were about cement trucks, flying cars, explosions, worldwide distribution of volcanoes, and -- hmm -- "Why does my Mommy sometimes run late".

Anyway, with less of a spectacular show, and more sit-and-talk time, the obvious risk is - - wiggliness. Yup. We got it.
But.
We also have a nice clean EMPTY question box ready for fresh stuff.
And, to my delight, one of the shyest class members came right up to me to ask about snail shells.

Microscope, Mushrooms, and Mythbusters

I brought in that TeeVee again. I think it's working really well as a way to help the students learn how to focus the microscope. Earlier this year I had a couple sessions that seemed fairly futile, to the effect of
Me: is the picture clear?
Student: I can't see.
Me: Here, let me put your hand on the focus wheel. Okay now turn it gently.
Student: I can't see.
Me: Try turning it a little more?
Student: I can't see.

But - - when the microscope image is transmitted onto a 20-inch TV screen, Ta Daa!
Me: Who would like to be our focus wallah?
Student: I would.
Me: Okay, turn that wheel. . . gently . . good. . . little more. .
Student [turns wheel]
Me: Can you see the picture is getting clearer?
Student: Yeah!
Class: Oooooh.
Class: Now let's look at the sandpaper!
Me: Who would like to be the next focus wallah? . . .

I brought in some genuine caliche (you know, the nasty limestone-clay crud under your lawn).
Hope #1: It would look interesting in the stereomicroscope. Well. Sort of.
Hope #2: By suspending some silty particles of it in water, we could look at them in the compound microscope. This is the part where I find out that getting the compound-microscope image into the TeeVee was much trickier.

Okay, the caliche was sort of a dud, but the teensy little twig with neat fungus found by a student was anything but a dud. Each of these little mushrooms is, oh, maybe half a millimeter high:









Back to the "dud" theme: I had heard the wild rumors that "Mentos and Diet Coke explode!!" so, I figured why not play MythBusters in class a little? Do they really expLODE?
Experiment.
Result.
If you put diet coke in a beaker, and toss in a Mento - - it - - uh - - fizzes a little bit.
Myth: Busted.
(after the fact, I YouTubed around a little to see what is the real story. Yeah. Mentos cause the CO2 to come out of solution. Y'know what? Salt does that too).

Cartoons! Butt jokes! The Spice Must Flow!

The arrival of a TeeVee set in class provoked loud excitement. Will we be watching Spiderman in science class? Well, no, but watch thiiiiiiiiis: with a digital camera, you can pick up the image in the microscope and transmit it to the TV screen. Here you see some crystals of ordinary table salt, and a little drop of water:

(the actual image inside the microscope is MUCH better than its blurred, low-resolution version on the tube)

Even though a lot of the adrenaline in the class was a response to the technological novelty (plus Spidey), I fancy that some hint of the intended idea made it through, i.e. a little more publicity for our friendly neighborhood microscope, a little more astonishment at the things you can see if you only look closely.
Also, I've noticed that focussing the microscope can be difficult for a 6 year old. With the image on the big screen, I can participate as the child struggles with the focus wheel. "Keep turning. Do you see, it's starting to get clearer? Sloooowly now . . . a little further". With luck this skill will still be there later when the child works the 'scope alone.

I never actually got to show off what I had discovered by accident at home. If you put a water droplet on a plastic dish (so the droplet beads up), and very gently push a sugar or salt crystal up close to it, there is a point where the crystal suddenly jumps from outside the water to inside. I suppose it's related to surface-tension. It's quite startling. Try it in your home stereomicroscope. I like it as an example of "who knew such weird things were going on right under our noses." (In class, with the TV turned around to share, resulting in Left::Right reversal, I couldn't quite summon the hand-eye coordination to show off the jumping-crystal phenomenon).

A helpful class member brought in a slice of skin - - a mole removal, I think. It had been cut, we are told, from Daddy's Bum. Good timing, that the TV was here today, because we could all see the Bum Skin Chunk under the microscope together (it looked a little like tripe). I might have done more – cross-sectioning, making a high-magnification slide, etc – but I wasn't quite clear as to whether the doctor needed it back, or whether it had to be kept in its formaldehyde, or what. Certainly it won plenty of attention. Perhaps there was more excitement about its being Bum Skin than about Fascinating Tissue Structure. Still, just like Spidey and the microscope, the flow was all in the right direction anyway.

As a followup to the week-before-last, I brought in a couple of leech books. I loved seeing how the original Leech Question Asking Kid grabbed that book like the gift-of-the-month and dove into it.
I learned that your typical Medical Leech has teeth - - lots and lots of them. (It uses them to shred your skin so The Blood Will Flow. Its saliva contains a good dose of anaesthetic, so you never feel a thing). The photograph in the book, though, was interesting, because all the sudden I knew exactly where David Lynch got the idea for those sand worms with their frightful snapping jaws!

Yeah. Leeches look like that. You must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer.

Finally, thanks to the dizzyingly insightful child whose question-box card asked

How are water molecules made ?
allowing us to have fun with the molecular models kit, illustrating the burning of Hydrogen in slow motion.


No class this week (field trip)
No class next week (spring break)
Thank you for sending us your fascinating and fascinated children.

Fossil synchronicity. Electricity (again). Gravity (again).

A student brought in a nice chunk of petrified wood to show around. Interesting timing, because I had chosen today to bring in my favorite Ammonite and Trilobite fossils. So we had a good ole time sharing fossils. Actually the Trilobite fossil technically belongs to my daughter who was somewhat territorial about letting others touch. That works okay for me, because as a class we are trying to learn to "look with your eyes, please, not your hands". It is terribly difficult but we are beginning to manage it. Trilobites are pretty cool. They were wildly successful all over the earth, possibly because they were the first critters to have eyes, which must have given them a fabulous advantage over everybody else. Unfortunately things got rough for them when some fish showed up with the first ever Big Sharp Teeth, and – well - that was it for the Trilobites. Three hundred million years at the top of the heap, and then - - pfffft. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Last week (which didn't get blogged due to post 'flu fatigue), we actually devoted almost the whole Discussion Portion to . . .
Leeches
Interesting surprise. One among us wanted to know how leeches eat, and the topic proved irresistible to one and all. Can they see? Can they smell? Where do they live? Do they live in Texas? (hint: yes). Unfortunately the library (which until now never let me down) is very weak in its selection of Leech books. I have, however, hunted down a couple good ones elsewhere, and will bring them in next Wednesday.

I don't seem to be able to get away from this electricity demo with the portable car starter battery and light bulb. Somebody wanted to know does salt water conduct electricity, and I cobbled together a lovely demonstration showing how brass and steel and copper all conduct electricity, and wood and plastic don't (the light bulb comes on when you have a good conductor). But when we got to the salt water - - fizzzle - - the current was too weak and the bulb didn't go on. That was last week. So this week I brought in our friend Mr. Multimeter and we could see the relative amperage levels when passing current through copper versus salt water, but after class I realized I had never got back to the original question which was salt water versus plain water. So I think the same apparatus has to come back one more time next week for another variation. In a way this is very instructive, because at least 75% of all experiments are miserable failures the first few hundred times you try them, and it really does take a bunch of tinkering to get them to show good results!

By the way, I do emphasize a good deal about safety and protective eyewear and Do Not Touch Certain Things, but a little home enforcement would probably not hurt. Something like, "No, honey, you can't go to the garage and take the taillights out of the car and hot wire them to the battery all by yourself. Let Mummy help you with that".


There was a pretty good sidebar on gravity, too. Apparently the question of No Gravity in Outer Space has been hotly debated ever since Deborah's spectacular Story Of The Universe show. A week ago I talked about gravity quite a bit (before we switched to the All Leeches All Day channel). This week one of the kids who had been out last Wednesday asked about gravity and outer space all over again. We all agreed that we'd already talked about it, but - - did we all get it? I don't think so. So it's good that the student opened an opportunity for a little repetition. From the responses I got it seemed the idea was sinking in better this time.

I like all the concrete and informative stuff, and I like how children catch on to things we know and how we learn them, but I have a certain special fondness for the real mind-bender questions they offer up with such generosity. Such as
"What would happen if you tried to push the whole universe?"
(My answer: "Before I try to answer: if you are going to push the universe . . . at the moment you are pushing . .. where are you?" You could see in their eyes. They totally got it. It was a hoot)

Looking at each week's new cards in the Question Box, I notice a dramatic improvement in the writing and spelling on these cards compared to last fall. How cool is that?

Bricks, Blood, Bulbs

 The Question Box contained a whole heap of Question Cards, all in the same handwriting, all beginning with
                How do you make
Clearly somebody was on a roll with these. I chose to share
                How do you make brick  
because of the  convenient tie-in with art class (where they were talking about clay and kilns just last week). This could have been a really short Q&A ("How do you make brick? You take clay. You bake it."), but trust our kids to find the leaks in any presentation. Hold on a second: I saw clay in art class. It was gray, not red! From here: yellow clay, red clay, iron oxide, Mars, . . .

Also in the question box was the scientific and poetic query
                Does your heart still beat when you don't feel it
which the class enthusiastically answered without my help ("if it didn't, you would be dead!"), and which led to a vociferous debate on the velocity of blood, and a wide-open opportunity to talk about the circulatory system. So, it's clear what I need to drag in from the library this week.

The demo/presentation for the week consisted of a genuine working electric circuit (battery plus lightbulb. As it turns out, I DID have a good reason to save all those old auto taillights in the box in the corner of the garage; I just didn't know it at the time). In a burst of either creativity or outright silliness, I asked the children to take part in a live action simulation drama in which they, as actors, played the part of copper atoms and had to pass a bunch of electrons (styrofoam balls) around the circle. Perhaps you parents can act the part of my Cognition Spies. By gentle and subtle interrogation, you try to find out whether that little masquerade had any impact. The child's state of mind could be something like
- yeah. I totally got the idea because it was so vivid this way
- he explained about a circuit, but trying to BE a circuit was a little overdone
- we played a game with styrofoam balls. I wonder why.
- science class? was there science class last week?

Three Points of Protocol

Just so you know, here are three things I constantly ask of the children.

1. Any time you have a science question during the week, write it on a card and drop it in The Question Box. Of course this can include questions you asked at home as well as at school.
2. Did you make any astonishing discoveries during last week?
3. What would you like to see or do for a weekly demonstration in the future?

So far, they have been generous with responses on all three. By all means encourage this.







 

Rocks. Who knew?

This week’s demo: grading the hardness of minerals using the traditional scratch test.

Examples:

Talc cannot scratch quartz, but quartz can scratch talc

Quartz cannot scratch diamonds, but diamonds can scratch quartz (etc)



I figured after all the excitement with fires and fizzes in recent demos, this one might achieve a collective yawn. Not so: everybody seemed fascinated by the idea. The more tests I did, the more the voices rose “now try the sandpaper on the steel! Now try the limestone on the chert!”. Scratching rocks together: who knew? I remember coming into class with high hopes about the size-of-the-solar-system demo, only to find practically no resonance. It’s easy to infer a simple rule such as that lessons are better “if I can touch it and see it”, but that doesn’t explain their excitement about imagining what is a googol, or how many molecules in a teaspoon, or the habits of pangolins.



As the year proceeds, I flatter myself that I am gradually improving my basic classroom-control tactics. Of course I don’t have the Black Magic Secrets that enable certain Montessori teachers (hint: first initial "D") to whisper “Children: Quiet” and bring a roomful of tornadoing screamers to a sudden frozen silence and rapt attention, but still I fancy the class is doing pretty well at remaining focused and seated in circle. Which brings up our little mini-anecdote: I had brought in a pair of safety glasses (“always wear these when breaking rocks with a hammer”). Just as I was congratulating myself on my Well Managed Group, one boy [name omitted] puts on the safety glasses: then, apparently fancying himself to be something like Bud The Spaceman with the glasses on, he takes off at about 100mph on hands and knees, giggling wildly. At this point two others pursue him (surely planning to restore order by open-field-tackling the perpetrator). For a moment it looked pretty dicey. I did manage to get everyone back to circle fairly quickly, but it was a good reminder about how close we are to the edge at every instant.



Questions from the Question Box included

How big is the world’s biggest tidal wave (I don’t know, so I dodged into How Earthquakes Make Tidal Waves and Tsunamis Is Another Word For Tidal Wave. I thought it would be dull to get into measuring tidal waves by height, mass, distance of dispersion …)

How thick are your teeth? (I didn’t know, so I brought in a digital caliper/micrometer the next day. Incisors are 3mm thick and molars 12mm. I am sure I looked pretty comical jamming a caliper into my face).



 

Pine cones, and Science Specialist goes YouTube

 There were so many demonstrations and artifacts to share last week, that we never got to the Question Box. I knew I owed the class some Question Box time, and you can bet they knew it too. We dove right into it without any preliminaries. The first question in the box was about pine cones. Actually it was a pine cone. In the box. Not a written question. An actual pine cone. I think our young cognitive scientists enjoyed the play on symbology::reality. They were off like a hurricane, asking about seeds and seed-eaters and sap and edible versus poisonous and geometry and developmental genetics. Dang if them kids didn't spend twenty minutes asking questions about a pine cone! Your average professor teaching a college seminar would count herself lucky indeed to find students so involved and thoughtful.
This week's demonstration involved baking soda and vinegar. Parental note: mixing baking soda and vinegar is a lot of fun, and may save you on one of those awful cabin-bound rainy days.
Now, those bubbles you get from baking soda and vinegar are carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide will suffocate a fire, which was demonstrated by use of a candle. Join the class by watching the demo here (hosted by YouTube).


Welcome to the classroom. And thank you for the privilege of spending time with your crop of affable young geniuses.

Pretty Exciting Week

This week's new specimens-for-the-microscope:
1. A snippet of cedar with the little pollen-releasing niblets on it, for the stereoscope
2. Some actual pollen grains shaken onto a slide, for the compound microscope

It's like Professor Eisner said - - the stereoscope is a more fascinating instrument. The bit of cedar has all sorts of shapes and crevices, and if you look closely you can see a few thousand teeny pollen bits just getting ready to fall. The pollen-on-a-slide, cranked up to 400x, just looks like a bunch of circles.


Last week's chromatography practice worked out well:

as you can see newspaper works better than computer printer paper. Still, both of them yielded some pretty good separation:






Important facts about chromatography
1. It's what they use in all those DNA tests you see in the news
2. It's a lot of fun at home



I got these great molecules on eBay, and they are now available in the classroom:





I took the liberty of doing a Molecular Models Focus Group at home before the class, and I learned:
1. Six-year-old fingers have enough strength to build with these,
2. Six-year-olds can totally grok what this set is about.

What became clear in class is:
3. These things have INCREDIBLE "touch me now" appeal.

As a demo I built a propane molecule and, wouldn't you know it, I just happened to have a BernzOmatic handy just in case somebody didn't know what propane is. The flame, of course, caused a wave of excitement; although the sparks from the traditional hand striker were perhaps even more popular. I hope everybody remembered the molecules part after all the uproar.


There was also a lot of fuss about the camera I brought, so I ended up taking a few group pictures. I don't want to post pictures of your kids on the web, so contact me privately for copies.
 
Thanks to the kids for bringing in all their questions and a scorpion and a magnificent huge conch shell and a really good chert (Texas Agate) sample. I totally missed the great synchronicity between the chert (AKA flint) and the striker above. Oops.

Thanks to the grownups for letting me spend time with their delightful-beyond-belief children.

(Meta: Change in blogging software)

It looks like Google bought Blogspot, so they have, ahem, upgraded the software that manages this site. I hope it still works.
They announce that it is "bursting with features", showing they haven't read any books about good design, and therefore still haven't caught on to the fact that people are sick and tired of features, and would prefer things that work and are intelligible. Is your VCR still blinking "12:00" ? Yeah. 

Chromatography and Sandpaper

We did an exercise in chromatography. I will try to bring you pictures next session.

I brought in some sandpaper samples for microscoping. Here is what they look like (60,120,400, and 1000 grit - - click the thumbnails for the actual photo).

I also brought in this fascinating discovery but got so caught up in everything else that I forgot to show it to the class. It'll be brought in on 17 January. You can see the way it will be in a tray introducing the vocabulary of observation and inference.