Jenna- Elementary Science Methods Blog

 The focus questions for today's lab was: - What makes something living? -How do plants get their food? -Where does living stuff come from? Where does it go? -What makes a good lesson plan according to the NGSS? To investigate those questions we focused on reviewing our past materials. To review, we created tri-folds and used resources and our past knowledge to work to answer the above questions. Another fun activity we did in class was investigating 3 cubes and trying to figure out the 6th side without picking it up or moving it. This was an activity that focused on patterns and you had to make a claim and use evidence to try and reason with what the 6th side would be. It was a good example of something we could do in a classroom to keep students interested. Overall, I believe I learned a lot during Biology and am excited to apply it in the classroom.

 This week, the questions that we were focused on were: Why do organisms have so many similarities and yet so many differences? What makes a bird a bird?  To investigate those questions, we created a model of natural selection. We used beans and had a predator prey on the beans. We used a spoon as a bird beak and the environment was water. We had two different types of beans, one that floats and one that didn't float. In the model, the beans that didn't float were more likely to survive and were able to reproduce more than the ones that floated. We changed the model and used tweezers as the beak. That changed the simulation to make the beans that floated more likely to  float. The model was a good representation of natural selection because there were two different traits, and one was more likely to survive and then more likely to reproduce children with the same traits. We also watched a video about the ancestors of birds. It turns out that birds are actually a relative ...

This week, the driving questions were: Why do organisms have so many similarities, and yet so many differences? How do organisms get their traits? To investigate this, we we looked at rock pocket mice and why they seemed to change their color. We first looked at a series of pictures below and tried to put them in order of what  came first and what came next. After we put the pictures in order, we tried to come up with a reason for why there are more dark colored mice on the bottom pictures vs the top pictures. We then watched a video which explained that the dark color and that there was a complete change in the environment that the mice had to adapt to. The dark colored mice was a random adaptation, but natural selection caused the dark colored mice to have better odds of living, causing them to adapt to there being more dark colored mice. I am still wondering how the recessive gene of dark colored fur was able to be there before the rocks turned dark.

 The question we were focus don this week during lab was: Where does living stuff come from? Where does it go? To investigate this question, we focused on food chains and food webs and did a discussion and a simulation to demonstrate the energy moving through the food chain. During the simulation, we all were a part of the food chain, either a producer, primary consumer, or a secondary consumer. We used beans to represent the energy. The producer started out with 100 energy, but the producer had a lot of things that used up the energy and was only left with 10 energy left in the plant. When the primary consumer eats the plant, they only got 10 energy from it and had to spend a lot of the energy on movement and reproduction, and was only left with 1 energy. When the secondary consumers eat the primary consumer, they don't get enough energy to complete their tasks, so they need to eat multiple primary consumers to get enough energy. Because of that, there aren't very many seconda...