Launching STEM with Rosie Revere & The Most Magnificent Thing

Hi and welcome back! Hopefully you have read a few posts prior to this one and are planning to teach your students how to work in cooperative groups.  Once that is established, consider launching inquiry-based science in your classroom.  What better way to launch science then to read Rosie Revere Engineer and The Most Magnificent Thing. There is a little more information about how I use the books in reading below in the video.  I plan on reading the books and comparing and contrasting them during shared reading.  Once the students are excited about engineering we will practice working in a group and creating bug homes.  Read below to see what we have planned.

Research shows us that students perform better overall in school when they take part in inquiry-based science investigations.  Inquiry-based science allows students to explore questions and problems, develop explanations, elaborate on findings and concepts and assess their understanding.  To launch inquiry based science in younger grades consider starting with a simple yet engaging question.  Your question must have a measurable outcome.  For this project consider this question:  Do bugs prefer to live in hard or soft materials?  It's a simple question with a measurable outcome that can spark a number of follow up inquiries.  

You can use whatever materials you have on hand.  Here students have the choice between cups, trays, straws, pom poms, pipe cleaners and plastic tubes.  I also considered using paper tubes, paper egg trays, and strings, but wanted to keep it simple.

Students will work with their group to develop a hypothesis.  Once they have their hypothesis they will create homes with only one variable.  So if they want to put straws in a cup for hard materials, then they would put a soft material like pom poms in a cup. Once they build the homes they put them outside in a safe place.

You will then decide how long the investigation will last.  One suggestion would be to do this investigation on two Mondays, but record data every day in between during transitions.  Students will observe the homes at predetermined days and record their findings in their science logs.  When the investigation is over they will make a conclusion and then you can determine if they will come up with another investigation based on the first or if you will move on to another topic.  Before you move on, make sure students have plenty of opportunities to explain the findings of the investigation.