Seed Investigation

Hello, hello! We hope everyone had a marvelous Monday! We celebrated Earth Day in our classrooms today. Leading up to Earth Day we have been studying seeds, seeds and more seeds!  Our main selection last week was "A Fruit is a Suitcase for Seeds" by Jean Richards. It's a cute little nonfiction story that provides an illustrated description of seed dispersal (specifically fruits). It explains the purpose  of seeds and how they grow. It's hilarious watching the kids go through the cafeteria line and pointing out all of the fruit seed suitcases!

After reading about seeds all week and doing a lot of class discussion we planned a fun science activity!! We love hands-on science! It's so much fun! 

Gotta love technology!

We planned a special SEED INVESTIGATION for our young scientists. Brittany and I brought in many different kinds of fruit and did some seed research with our fruits. We labeled the fruits and added characteristics to our illustrations in our science notebooks. Students wrote about the different seeds they observed and used details to describe the seeds. 

Scientists in action!

For Example: 

The peach seed is dark brown and is called a pit. You can't eat the pit. It is in the middle of the fruit. 

They did this for all of the different fruits and vegetables we brought in. They loved using their science tools (microscopes and magnify glasses) to describe the different characteristics of the seeds. They did a great job and gathered a whole bunch of new learning!

Here is a Science Notebook Freebie if you would like to do something similar with your class! 

Have a great day!! 

Science Notebooks

We have used our science notebooks so much more this year thanks to common core.

We hope to use them even more next year! It's such a great way for students to record new learning and build on previously learned concepts.


How often do you use science notebooks in your class? Do you use them in centers at all??

Extreme Weather

Florida hasn't been feeling much like the sunshine state lately!  We've been "suffering" through near freezing  temperatures for the past week!  I know... I know... I don't have much room to complain. There are many places buried under several feet of snow across the country!  I actually had to defrost my windshield yesterday before I left for work!  (insert surprised face here) I haven't had to do that since I left New Hampshire back in 2004!  (eww almost 10 years ago)  Yikes!  Anyways... in lieu of these frigid temps... I thought I'd post about our learning on extreme weather.  A few weeks ago, we were studying the ai and ay (long A) phonics pattern and our weekly story from the Treasures series was titled "Stormy Weather".  My kids absolutely LOVED it!  Although weather is not "technically" a first grade standard... Melissa and I decided to roll with it anyway .  It's hard to pass up an opportunity to extend our students' thinking beyond what the curriculum says... especially when they are so eager to learn!!! SOOOO... we came up with this fun project we called "Extreme Weather Organizers".  I wish y'all could have been in our rooms to witness our firsties participating in this activity... they were (drum roll please...) cooperatively learning, researching, sharing ideas, taking on leadership roles, creatively thinking... and most importantly ACTIVELY ENGAGED!!! It was A-MAZ-ING!!! It was one of those moments when, as a teacher, I could actually stop, look around and think WOW!  I should mention that before we started we set the ground rules by stating what cooperative learning looks like, how we should talk to our partners, and what working together looks like and sound like.  So here's a glimpse at what we did... 

We paired our kids up according to how we thought they'd work together best!  They were asked to buddy read "Stormy Weather" with their partner and decide (together) what information they wanted to share in their poster. 




Once they had decided how they were going to design their poster they got straight to work.  I had the organizers previously made on chart paper.  Nothing fancy, I literally wrote them with marker!  It took me less than 5 minutes.  They were asked to write a "Did you know..." question about each storm mentioned in our story (hurricane, tornado, hailstorm, and blizzard).  The "did you know" fact had to reflect a new learning, something they didn't know before reading the story.  We modeled these sentence on the SmartBoard before we let them do it independently. 

Here's an example of what the original template looked like ...

 Here's an example of what the groups created... (their pictures were obviously drawings, not clipart haha)

We had the kids share their work with the class when everyone was finished.  Overall, we were very pleased with how this project turned out!  It was a great summarizer for our weekly reading on weather!  Stay warm fugal followers!!!

Science Fair

The dreaded, REQUIRED, annual Science Fair project is due on Thursday. Our first graders LOVE LOVE LOVE Science, and we think it's pretty awesome too! However, something about the word required makes it not-so-fun for teachers. In k-2 at our school the class does a project together. This year we asked the question, "Which liquid stains teeth the most?" We are using hard boiled eggs (the shell is made of calcium, very similar to our tooth enamel) and a few of our favorite sugary drinks to find our results.

Before we went too far into what our project was all about, we decided to tackle the SCIENTIFIC METHOD with our firsties. We created an anchor chart together to explain the steps scientists use.

We suggest incorporating a lot of WHOLE BRAIN teaching when explaining these steps to your students. Fancy words like HYPOTHESIS can be very tricky for first graders to say, let alone understand. Trust us, the more whole brain learning... the better. 

Today we wrote out our question: "Which liquid stains teeth the most?"

Next we wrote down our Hypothesis. Most students think coffee will stain teeth the most. Even our student's were saying, "Oh no! Ms. Peterson and Ms. Prussing are in trouble. They love coffee"

We put one egg into each of the four liquids (coffee, grape juice, sweet tea and Root Beer). The eggs are going to soak in the liquids for the next few days. Tomorrow we plan on making observations and recording our data from day 1 and day 2. 

More Science Fair fun to come!

Science Notebooks

This year our state is following the Common Core Standards (Florida style). This calls for much more integration, which we LOVE! We use Composition books as our Science Notebook using a ribbon bookmark and a large envelope in the back for "extras." We have found that some of our firsties struggle to write on the small lines and have a difficult time creating graphic organizers, so many times we just make a quick template ourselves and create two to a page so it can fit in the notebook easily. This has worked out very nicely this year. When we return from winter break we will be finishing up our Sun and Stars Unit and moving into our Plants Unit. 

We hope to create another garden in our school. 

Science Notebook- Plants