Teachable Moments: The Oil Spill and Fragility of Marine Ecosystems

These days, our oceans are constantly in the news. Students hear a lot about the fragility of marine ecosystems from a variety of sources. Media outlets and nonprofit organizations offer explanations, in-depth coverage, and commentary on the political and corporate implications of oil-spill disasters, but how can educators help students learn about these important environmental issues in a way that is compelling, thought-provoking, and educational? Some resources include:

• ABC News provided a link to coverage that featured: Educators Using Gulf Oil Spill as a “Teachable Moment”
• The Environmental Protection Agency has a listing of links that provide resources for educators.

Another resource is the Seeds of Science/Roots of Reading® unit Shoreline Science, which addresses this timely situation in a series of lessons called “How Humans Impact the Shoreline.” After building background on shoreline ecosystems, students delve into an investigation of oil spills in order to gain insight into the world’s dependence on oil and other instances of human impact that endanger shorelines. They learn where oil comes from, the many ways people use oil, and how and why people should conserve oil. Students read The Black Tide, a book that provides an accessible account of the Prestige oil spill off the coast of Spain in 2002. Students go on to investigate the effects of oil on the beach through creating a model oil spill, testing the effects of oil on different materials, and using a variety of methods to attempt to clean up the oil spill. Students then participate in a structured conversation called a Discourse Circle to debate the statement: Students like us can help prevent oil from spilling in the oceans. In a Discourse Circle, students make explanations about this statement based on evidence they have gathered through both their firsthand experience with the oil spill as well as their reading of The Black Tide.

The Shoreline Science unit includes instructional supports to help students make sense of their firsthand experiences and reading. For example

Discovering Ways to Protect Our Shorelines – Helping Elementary Students Understand the Effects of Erosion

If you asked elementary students where you’d find a scientist, they would likely say the lab.  The beach would not be a likely answer, but that is just where they’d find Gary Griggs, a Shoreline Scientist.  Every October, we celebrate Earth Science Week.  It’s a great opportunity to teach students about erosion and the challenges shoreline scientists like Gary face as they try to understand and mitigate the impact of erosion on shorelines.

In Shoreline Scientist, students learn key concepts about why some sandy beaches are endangered.  You can help students understand the concept of disappearing sand with the following classroom activity taken from the Seeds of Science/Roots of Reading® Shoreline Science unit:

Draw a picture on the board to help reinforce the sequence of events that causes sandy beaches to get smaller and shorelines to be unprotected.

a. Draw a mountain, the ocean and a river connecting the two.  Say “Water travels from the mountains to the ocean.  It carries with it new sand and tiny pieces of rock that will become sand.”  Draw sand accumulating at the shoreline and tell students that this is how some sandy beaches form. (Figure 4-8A)

b. Draw a dam across

Wow Your Students with the Biggest Animal Ever to Walk on Land!

I felt like a mouse looking up the giant leg of an elephant.”  That’s what Rodolfo Coria remembers about his first look at the huge bones of an unknown dinosaur.  Coria, and another paleontologist, dug up some unusual bones that had been found in the desert in Argentina.  The bones tuned out to belong to a kind of dinosaur that no one had known about before.  The paleontologists named the dinosaur Argentinosaurus after their country.  Argentinosaurus was bigger than any other dinosaur ever found.  In fact, it was the biggest animal ever to walk on land!  Here’s a look at the world’s first fully mounted Argentinosaurus (found at the Fernbank Museum of Natural History in Atlanta).

It weighed over 100 tons and measured more than 123-feet-long, the length of nearly three school buses.  Uncovered in Patagonia, Argentina, its name means “Argentine Lizard.”  This plant-eating creature feasted primarily on conifers and lived 90 million years ago.

Finding the biggest animal ever to walk on land was impressive.  Then Coria went on to discover

Taking Notes Based on Observations with a Sky Notebook

Elementary students need practice to learn to discern between observations and inferences.  The book and Strategy Guide featured in this article gives you the tools you need to teach this important skill.  When elementary students learn how to observe, they use one or more of their five senses to take notice of what otherwise might go undetected.  You can help elementary students learn to record observations which involves detailed note taking.  Below is information you can use to implement a note-taking strategy with your elementary students.  It includes the use of a student book called Sky Notebook, but can also be used with other content readers.  You’ll also find a pdf link for a FREE Strategy Guide, “Taking Notes Based on Observations“ which expands upon the information in this article.

Sky Notebook is set in the mountains of Colorado where winter storms move through quickly.  The narrator is an amateur meteorologist who takes measurements and keeps detailed notes to document changes in the weather. Photographs are used to illustrate these observations.  National weather maps are also included; they present temperature and precipitation readings in a visual format and supplement the narrator’s observations. Readers can observe changes in the weather—such as amount of cloud cover, temperature, and humidity—as a winter storm moves in. The data presented in the book provide readers with opportunities to make predictions and inferences about the weather, not only in Colorado, but also across the United States.

Students can read Sky Notebook or another content reader with detailed illustrations or photographs that prompt rich observations and lend themselves to making detailed notes.  Here is a copymaster that can be used for

Drinking Cleopatra’s Tears – A Lesson in the Water Cycle for Elementary Students

Are you drinking Cleopatra’s tears?  That may seem like a strange question for elementary students to answer, but you can tell them that they might be!  When Cleopatra was alive thousands of years ago, the water that was in her tears is still on Earth today.  The water in Cleopatra’s tears become part of all the other water on Earth. So there could be a tiny bit of that water in anything you drink.

Intriguing questions stimulate students’ imaginations and curiosities.  In the Seeds of Science/Roots of Reading® book Drinking Cleopatra’s Tears, students hear humorous questions, the answers to which help them understand how the water cycle works. Questions include:

Are you washing dishes with a caveman’s sweat?

Are you taking a bath in T. Rex spit?

Are you breathing a puddle?

Have you ever gone for a walk in the clouds?

The answers to these and

Helping Elementary Students See That Chemical Reactions Are Everywhere

Science labs are not the only places where chemical reactions happen.  Have you ever seen bread turn brown in a toaster?  If the answer is yes, you have observed a chemical reaction.  The Seeds of Science/Roots of Reading® student book Chemical Reactions Everywhere, explains what a chemical reaction is and how to look for evidence of a reaction.  Students learn about lots of ordinary chemical reactions that happen in our everyday lives.  After reading this book, they will begin to notice chemical reactions everywhere.  Below are a few of the chemical reactions featured in the book:

FIREWORKS EXPLODE

Fireworks explode because of chemical reactions.  As they explode, fireworks produce flashes of light.  The flashes are evidence that chemical reactions are happening.  The reactions are giving off energy in the form of light.  These reactions also give off energy in the form of heat, so fireworks are dangerous to handle.

APPLES TURN BROWN

A fresh slice of apple is usually white.  Leave the slice out for a while, and it turns brown.  That change is evidence of a chemical reaction!  Substances in the apple combine with oxygen in the air.  A chemical reaction happens, forming new substances with new properties.  The new substances make the apple look brown instead of white.  The change in color is evidence that a chemical reaction is happening.

LIGHT STICKS GLOW

Kids often carry glowing light sticks with them on the Fourth of July.  To make a light stick start glowing, you bend it until it snaps.  The glow happens because of a chemical reaction.

Bending the stick breaks a tube inside the stick.  The tube is keeping different substances in the stick apart.  When the tube breaks, the substances are able to combine, and this starts a chemical reaction.  This chemical reaction gives off light, but not heat.  That’s why the light sticks are safe to hold.  It is important to note that light sticks have dangerous substances inside and should never be opened.

Other chemical reactions featured in the book include:

Are birds really dinosaurs? The answer to this and much more about our feathered friends.

Dinosaurs? Are you sure?!

Birds are closely related to a group of dinosaurs called therapods – carnivorous dinosaurs with short forelimbs that walked or ran on strong hind legs. Extinct therapods include carnivorous dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus rex. The first therapods are traced to about 220 million years ago. Today, birds are the only living therapods. Read more in this article from the University of California Museum of Paleontology.

Birds constitute a large group of related organisms, and within the large group are smaller subgroups as described in the following.

Ostriches and Their Kin. Ostriches, emus, rheas, and cassowaries are a related group of birds. They share the identifying characteristics of

“The World Is Round!”

“We’re not the first to discover this, but we’d like to confirm, from the crew of Apollo 17 that the world is round.” This humorous message was relayed by Eugene Cernan, astronaut on Apollo17’s mission to the Moon. On the way to the moon, Cernan had an amazing view of Earth. After four days of traveling through space, Cernan and his fellow astronauts reached the moon. As they skipped and hopped on the Moon’s surface, they sang a jovial song and their glee was quite evident.[youtube:wo3-fuYKWB4]

Their excitement and enthusiasm is childlike. Many dream of becoming astronauts and experiencing such wondrous moments. However, astronauts are not the only people who get the chance to take part in these missions. Engineers and space scientists also play an important role in space exploration.

In the elementary student book, Exploring Planets and Moons, elementary students not only learn about the astronauts that landed on the moon, but also an engineer who designs space robots and a space scientist who uses telescopes and other tools to explore parts of space too far away for a spacecraft to reach. This book serves as an introduction to the Seeds of Science/Roots of Reading® Planets and Moons unit and helps students understand that there is a variety of ways to explore the Solar System and beyond.

In addition to astronaut Gene Cernan, students meet

Help Elementary Students Understand that Earth is Spinning

It is difficult for elementary students to believe that Earth is spinning around. The ground isn’t moving. If Earth is rotating, why isn’t the sky moving around? If you watched the sky long enough, you would see the stars spinning around.

Photo credit: Kaj R. Svensson/Photo Researchers. Inc.

The picture to the left is the sky at night. The camera wasn’t spinning – Earth was!  A photographer set up a camera to point at the sky. He left the camera to take a picture slowly for a few hours. The streaks in the picture are made by stars. These streaks are called star trails.

Star trails are evidence that Earth rotates. The stars seem to move around as Earth rotates. The motion seems to be very slow, but over time stars can leave long trails in a photograph, as you can see.

In the Seeds of Science/Roots of Reading® student book Spinning Through Space, from the Planets & Moons unit, elementary students learn that though the ground beneath their feet may seem to stay still, Earth is actually moving faster than a roller coaster!

Spinning Through Space helps students understand the rotation and orbit of planets in the Solar System. The book is framed around of a series of surprising statements about Earth, day and night, the movement of objects in space, and the length of a year.

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Educators and Students Benefit from Integrating Elementary Science and Literacy Lessons

Jacquey Barber, co-principal investigator for Seeds/Roots and associate director of the Lawrence Hall of Science, discusses how the Seeds/Roots program engages student in multiple ways in order to provide a deeper understanding of the concepts and practice of science.

A growing trend in today’s schools is curriculum integration. Finding the logical synergies in the curriculum helps educators integrate subject areas and present content in a meaningful way.  Students learn skills that can transcend various subject areas and come away with a better understanding of the big picture.

Seeds of Science/Roots of Reading focuses on