( 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.