Hello Families! Please let us introduce ourselves. We are Dr. Sandra Pearl and Dr. Elizabeth Bless and we are thrilled to be in your child’s classroom this year. We will come to them about every 2 weeks and will always bring a fun activity of some kind with us. The lessons will span a wide variety of topics including engineering, chemistry, earth sciences (rocks, soil), life sciences (populations), anatomy & physiology, space sciences and more.
We began this week by comparing science to a puzzle. Scientists look at previous data, come up with theories, test their theories and then come to a conclusion. But often a whole new piece of data comes along and scientists need to completely rethink their ideas and come up with a new idea. As an example, remember when Pluto was just considered one of the nine planets? Of course new data came along and Pluto is now grouped with several other ‘dwarf planets’. So we gave the students a literal puzzle this week with 4 pieces and asked them to assemble it (easy!). After they completed the first one we added a new piece to their puzzle and told them to assemble it again, adding this new piece of ‘data’. This proved quite a bit harder! But hopefully the students saw that perseverance pays off and that often times in science you ‘fail’ at something several times before you finally achieve success.
We ended our class by asking students to give us some thoughts about what they’d like to learn in science this year. Certainly ‘explosions’ ranked high on their list but so did some other ideas (see attached picture).
We look forward to a fun year ahead with your students and hope to spark their interest in science!
Drs. Pearl and Bless
I think this is such a great idea. My daughter was so excited to tell me about what she learned from SfS. I look forward to hearing about the next lesson. Thank you!