This is a wonderful series from the first LEGO EB with Alex and Lilith. I was asking them about the impact of the relative size of the pulleys in a belt and pulley drive system.

Genetic Engineering 101

Mr. B's class tackles difficult material with teamwork.

In connection with the human body focus the class will be doing an actual cloning experiment.  They will take the gene for Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) from a jelly fish, make 10's thousands of copies of it with the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) then insert that gene into living bacteria with a plasmid.

Obviously this requires an enormous amount of knowledge that most 5th/6th grade students don't have (like high school and college biology).  Even reading the experiment description and student manual was difficult because it is full of terms, concepts and methods that they don't know.  I took this as an opportunity to suggest strategies for tackling difficult material including summarizing and outlining.

The entire class is now sharing a google document that they can all edit in real time. Each student took responsibility for a few paragraphs. After reading their section many times they are writing a summary in the co-authored outline on google docs.

In Chris's class we have been studying some electronics. We started out doing simple circuits with flashlight bulbs and batteries. Since they are Summers - Knoll kids they blasted through that in a flash. So we moved on the what I called "Arguably the most important invention of the last 100 years."  

It is always fun to see that students say when I ask them what they think is the most important invention of the last 100 years is. Try asking. If you really want to make it interesting see if you can get them to tell you why they think that their choice is so important.

For a few weeks we have been working on some simple transistor circuits. (You guessed it my candidate is the transistor. The entire electronics industry would not be possible without it.) The circuit below is a transistor switch circuit. 

Today was very cool. The class was buzzing. When we started this project I told them that it would include some frustrating parts. That I was asking a lot of them but in return they would be masters of the most important invention of the last 100 years. Pretty Epic don't you think.

Today was cool because they really turned the corner on their understanding. In addition, they were eagerly helping each other so all the groups mastered the circuit. Another fun part is that I get to be diabolical by sabotaging the circuits to see if they can troubleshoot them and fix them again.

Following their lead.

So yesterday I spent about an hour in my neighborhood recycling rolloff (read dumpster) looking for clear plastic bottles to do this great lesson on buoyancy where the kids make their own Cartesian Diver.  I was filling a tub with water when Susan's class can in from outside and they started asking about what we were going to do with the water.  I asked if they knew why some things float and some sink? We got all kinds of opinions and the discussion was off and running.  Some said metal sinks and wood floats.  That got me thinking so I took a piece of aluminum foil and made a ball and it floated.  It just felt wrong to step on such curiosity. I dropped my plans and started playing with them, the foil and some glass "jewels."

They were so totally engaged that we spent the next hour building "boats" out of aluminum foil and designing controlled experiments to see how well they floated. Terms like liquid, solid and crystallize came up. Again I'm reminded that we don't need to "hook" kids into exploring the world. This afternoon with Val's class I'm going to start out following their lead.

Battles from LEGO EB

They begged me to post these to the blog.

Some time back we learned about benthic macroinvertebrates and how they can tell us about the health of a river. We went to the Huron river and collected samples of the benthic macroinvertebrates. It can be challenging to identify the different critters so I sought some professional help (sic).

The Huron River Watershed Council (HRWC)collects benthic macro invertebrates from the entire Huron river watershed. I attended their ID day where aquatic entimologistes help identify the invertebrate samples. Paul Steen is the watershed ecologist at the HRWC. Paul was kind enough to help me assemble a "library" of benthic macroinvertebrates.

Several of our students were uncomfortable with the standard method of collecting which includes putting the "bugs" in alcohol the kill and preserve them. My hope is that with a "library" of samples the killing step will not be necessary.

Here is a clip of Paul helping some of the voluenteers to identify samples.

How to vacuum pack a child

We were connecting a tiny video camera to a helium balloon and the a student asked what would happen if I let it go. The discussion was facinating and it became clear that we needed to cover atmospheric pressure.

In addition to a discussion their being a "sea" of air above us.  I wanted the students to feel the pressure all around them.  So during lunch break I have been bringing a shop vac and a large plastic garbage bag.

Before I would turn on the vacuum I had the child practice saying "stop" very loudly so that they knew I would stop if they felt frightened.

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