Mystery tubes 2012

This year I have a new title (scientist in residence) at Peregrine School, and a new format: every Friday morning with grades 1-2 for three months, then with grades 5-7 for three months, then grades 3-4 for three months.  This should allow me to go much further in depth with each group, and to facilitate really substantive projects on their part.  Today was my first day with the five first and second graders, and to break the ice I brought some "mystery tubes" which are basically like the one shown on this short video.

The students got their hands on the tubes, did any experiment they wanted to (short of looking inside the tubes), and drew what they thought was inside.  Most students went through a couple of iterations as they realized that their first model wouldn't reproduce their observations.  When a student was satisfied with his/her drawing, I brought out toilet paper tubes, strings, beads, etc so they could build a model and show that it behaved like the real thing.  The point: science is about building models (usually mental models rather than physical models), and this activity allows us to practice many aspects of this in one session, including thinking of experiments to test the model, performing those experiments, generating predictions from the model (hypothetico-deductive reasoning), and comparing the results of the experiments to predictions generated from the model.  Furthermore, since I never allowed them to look inside the tube we had ample opportunity to discuss how science is less about knowing the right answer than about the process of finding answers.  After all, nature never tells us the right answer directly.  Kids at this age are very much in the mode of gaining knowledge from books, but it is worth making them stop and think about how every bit of the knowledge in books was, at some point, figured out by someone who had to figure out by reasoning and then convince other people that it was correct. 

You can also read about the way I did this activity with mixed ages (grades 1-6) last year.   A note for teachers using this activity: it took much more time this year, 45 minutes, because the 1-2 graders did not have the fine motor skills to easily build their little toilet-paper-tube model with strings and beads.  With mixed ages last year, it seemed as if the young ones contributed equally intellectually, but the older ones probably did the actual tying of strings and beads.  And the 45 minutes was with two adults helping four kids!  If you try it with a larger group of 1-2 graders, you'll have to bring full-size materials. I do this activity with college students (who find it interesting and beneficial) so this activity is remarkable for the range of ages who find it suitable!

I learned something from Teacher Marcia too.  With five minutes remaining in the period, I wanted to have a wrap-up discussion with the kids.  She showed me a way to make kids pay full attention to the wrap-up discussion rather than surreptitiously keep working on their model: move them from the material-strewn desks over to the rug where they listen to stories etc.  This was brilliant.  Now if I can figure out how to do this with college students, I'll be set!