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Here's a fun activity that I did on Enrichment Day at our school. My school has been reading Eric Jensen's book Teaching with Poverty in Mind.   In the book, Jensen talks about making sure that we are enriching our students minds - through art, music, woodworking, dance, crafts, etc... Our students were given the choice to sign up for two classes ranging from chess to hip-hop dancing.  I, naturally, taught a science course and had 20 eager second and third graders who were so excited to investigate.  I had bought some Worm Goo from Steve Spangler at http://www.stevespanglerscience.com/ / You can buy all different kinds - blue, green, red, black...even glow in the dark for about $6.99.  Not a bad price for a ton of fun! We started off the day watching some of Steve's videos on You Tube from when he was on the Ellen show.  The kids giggled and were amazed as we watched all the things he had to show us.  Trust me...some of the things he does are crazy!! Then we explored: As y

Just in time for the holidays . . . the beasts are back! The Secret Science Club presents the 6th-annual “Carnivorous Nights TAXIDERMY CONTEST,”   Friday, December 9, 8 pm  @ the  Bell  House , $7 Calling all science geeks, nature freaks, and rogue geniuses ! Your stuffed squirrel got game? Got a beaver in your brownstone? Bring your beloved beast to the Bell House and enter it to win! Eligible to enter : Taxidermy (bought, found, or homemade), biological oddities, articulated skeletons, skulls, jarred specimens—and beyond, way beyond. Show off your moose head, snake skeleton, rabbit relics, and other amazing specimens. Compete for prizes and glory.  Share your taxidermy (and its tale) with the world. The contest will be judged by our panel of savage taxidermy enthusiasts, including Robert Marbury of the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists and feline wrangler Dorian Devins , co-founder and curator of the Secret Science Club . Plus! --Groove to furry tunes & video --Se

John Steele Gordon argues ---over on Bloomberg's recently revamped "echoes" blog---that historians of the US stock market in the mid-twentieth century has been misled by that market's most prominent index. The handiwork of a publisher (Dow) and a statistician (Jones), the Dow-Jones Industrials evolved from a series of focused indexes into a single number meant to represent the entire NY exchange, and by proxy the American economy. But for all the power and influence this number has had, Gordon shows how dependent it is on basic assumptions. Swap out AT&T for IBM in the Depression years and the market recovery comes years before we have generally thought. For our purposes, the Dow, its development, and public understandings of stock indexes strike me as topics awaiting a historian of science's analysis. I would read that book. -- If you haven't seen the new "echoes" blog---edited by Stephen Mihm, the UGA historian of capitalism in the US, it'

I just love the website http://www.wiseowlfactory.com/  .  The author, Carolyn Wilhelmn has a goal to publish activities for a book a day for a whole year.  Recently, I came across one for the Photographic Fantasy Stranger in the Woods.   This is a book my mother in law gave me many years ago when I was first starting out in teaching and have used for many years since!  She has published a great resource involving Inferring Questions based on the book and I would love for you to check it out.  http://www.wiseowlfactory.com/BookaDay/PDFs/2011/11/ainferringwithstrangerinwoodsa.pdf She has many other science related literature connections such as.... Agate, What Good is a Moose? Animals Asleep Are You a Grasshopper? Aunt Chip and the Great Triple Creek Dam Affair Baby Whale's Journey BATS by Gail Gibbons Beaver at Long Pond Biggest, Strongest, Fastest Bonny's Big Day CATS by Gibbons Chameleon, Chameleon Do Tornadoes Really Twist? Earthquake in the Early Morning Everybody Needs a

Sorry I have been a little inactive, but I have been having a blast with my family for Thanksgiving, my friends at our VAST conference and my students...but now, I am ready to blog again!  So as I sit by my computer today, I am thinking about wondering... Do you wonder? Do you ask your students to wonder? Scientists wouldn't be anywhere without that magic word.  This magical time of year is the perfect time to wonder in your classroom, too.  I have created several wonder sheets that are available for FREE on my Teachers Pay Teachers website that will help you implement wondering in your classroom.  This first packet will be the wonderings of weather and winter.  I have used photos to spark the creativity in us all.  You can use these as warm ups, morning work, and even homework.  Check them out:   http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/What-do-you-wonder-about-winter-weather Also, I am really curious as to what you are wondering about science instruction.  I am about to be a

Loyal AmericanScience reader Anna Zeide wonders about Thanksgiving in a post-can world over at the Food Studies section of Grist. Check it out . For those of you who teach some environmental history or history of technology alongside history of science, I can vouch for "The Miracle of the Can" as a great tool to generate discussion right around Thanksgiving. Seasons be damned! For more Thanksgiving scholarly fun, see Neil Prendergast's recent Environmental History article on " Raising the Thanksgiving Turkey ." Talking Turkey the Somewhat-Old-Fashioned Way... And a final tid-bit, from the department of applied science: Butterball University !

This weekend I participated in the Stocking Symposium at the American Anthropological Association (AAA) Annual Meeting in Montreal. Named to honor George Stocking – widely credited with legitimating anthropology as subfield of historical study – the Symposium was begun in 2006 to provide a forum for historical perspectives at the AAA. The panel featured about a dozen papers, many of which focused on the contributions of individual theorists like Franz Boas, his student Zora Neale Hurston, and even Irving Goffman (long claimed by sociology). Discussant, Ira Bashkow, an anthropologist at University of Virginia, responded to the relatively favorable portrayal of these subjects with some pointed reflections on the state of the field. He revisited Stocking’s important 1965 essay, " On the limits of ' presentism ' and ' historicism ' in the historiography of the behavioral sciences. " In that piece, Stocking was interested in importing more rigor into the m

Okay so yesterday I walked you through parts of the website.  Today we are going to look at the most important part...Teacher Resources.  Just to remind you...  www.fossweb.com 1.  Go to your grade level band on the right side (grades 3-5) 2. Click on the module you want to explore - Magnetism and Electricity 3. Click on the Parent/Teacher resources section Now we are here!  1.  Module Summary - gives you a basic description of what you will learn during this module 2. Home School Connection - gives you access to the family newsletter, math problem of the week, project ideas and home/school connections 3.  Teacher Resources: The Resource Database has a collection of non-fiction and fiction books that complement the unit as well as recommended videos, websites and software. Module Teaching Notes:  This is a forum where people have added tips, background knowledge and information about materials. If there is a change that needs to be made post publication date, this is where you would f

What's the place of science (specifically, American science) in literature (specifically, American literature)? While literary scholars have written more about this than have historians, I think more dialogue's in order between historians of science and New Historicists. As a way in, I'll start where lots of others do – with Thomas Pynchon. He's a special case for reasons of both content and style. First: it's a commonplace to note the omnipresence of references to (and meditations on) science, technology, and their aftermath in his work. Second: Pynchon's well-known obsession with dialectics (order vs. entropy, free will vs. determinism, technology vs. nature, &c.) bleeds into his prose in the form of endless appositions, yoyo-ing run-ons, and the interplay of colloquial dialogue and technical digressions. Both points matter for understanding the place of science in Pynchon's novels because they help us see that it's more than just one side of a bin

This weekend I had the great opportunity to work for Delta/FOSS at the Virginia Association of Science Teachers Workshop.  I was able to present on Science Notebooks as well as how using Inquiry Science has helped raise my Reading Scores.  While there, I talked to several teachers who wanted some help navigating the FOSS website.Right now we are in transition from the current website to the newer third edition site.  The third edition site is available for free right now, but will soon be only available to teachers using the new program.  I will talk about that website on another day.  Today I will talk about the current website and all the FREE resources .  So, here it is... First, go to www.fossweb.com . Wow - there is so much to see!  On the left hand side, you can find all the current news , newsletters and professional development activities available. At the bottom of the left hand side is a box that says: Beyond the Classroom  This is where you can find a lot of good informatio

Last week's issue of Science  included a number of short articles on the effects of the budget crisis on science funding in the United States. Most emphasized the challenges that budget cuts present for administrators at NSF, NASA, NIH, and other science agencies who must determine the priorities for research funding. As I read the essays, I wondered about the contributions that taking a longer perspective on American science funding or the agencies involved might provide to these debates. For example, Yudhijit Bhattacharjee writes about a  dilemma facing NASA administrators , in particular those who manage the agency's astronomy and planetary science initiatives. They reportedly must choose between supporting big-budget, high profile programs and the many smaller programs that gather little media attention. Bhattacharjee quotes one administrator who sees smaller programs as more important, in that they "maintain and train our next generation of scientists," while ano

I noticed a fascinating Call For Papers this morning on h-net for a conference on "Science, Space, and the Environment," sponsored by the Rachel Carson Center in Munich and scheduled for thus July 17-18 at London's Science Museum. Here's the pitch: "Although the sciences have provided critical resources in environmental debates, their own role in environmental change has been little studied. This conference will explore how the sciences have affected the physical environment." The organizers seem to have negative impacts on the environment foremost in their minds, but there are clearly other directions one could take such an inquiry. Don Worster's Nature's Economy imagined science to have split personalities when it came to nature: the "Arcadian" strain of science produced knowledge that helped humans understand, love, and live with nature; the "imperial" strain led to domination and abuse. Forgive me a pun, but I imagine that t

Step into the Way-Back Machine . . . the Secret Science Club is heading back tens of thousands of years to explore the mysteries of human origins!  As  a species,  Homo sapiens  is a mere 250,000 years old (give or take). Around 100,000 years ago, we walked out of our homeland in Africa and proceeded to populate the entire world. Now, we're the only species of human left. So how did we evolve  into our freakishly amazing selves? And what about the other humans? What were our ancestors and extinct relatives like? Just returned from Kenya and the northern  Sudan , paleoanthropologist William Harcourt-Smith of the American Museum of Natural History and Lehman College lectures on recently discovered hominid and primate species , new research on human evolution and our family tree, and his expeditions to a 20-million-year-old fossil site. Dig it! Before & After --Groove to primordial sounds --Stick around for the scintillating Q&A --Try our Darwinian cocktail of the ni

I very much agreed with Hank's recent post about this year's HSS, so I thought I'd add my two cents.  In particular, I wanted to say something about the "Making Mathematics: Models, Machines, and Materialities" panel.  It was excellent; indeed, one of the best at this year's HSS! Although the presentations were quite diverse, the panel had a remarkably tight and coherent theme. Chris Phillips delved into the history of the chalkboard as a ubiquitous tool in American mathematical pedagogy. David Roberts talked about the late 19th century enthusiasm for "linkages," that is, mechanical instruments that transformed circular motion into a perfectly straight line.  Stephanie Dick explored the architecture of a mid 20th century geometry theorem proving machine developed at IBM.  And Alma Steingart discussed the role of visualization in topology.  In her talk, Steingart argued that although Stephen Smale had conclusively shown that a sphere can be turned in

...for science! At the recent meeting of the Forum for the History of Science in America at HSS, David Spanagel awarded Michael Pettit of York University with the Forum's article prize for this year. Pettit's article, "The Problem of Raccoon Intelligence in Behaviorist America" appeared in the British Journal for the History of Science in September 2010. You can read the article here . We'll publish the award citation and feature a conversation with Pettit. But for now: enjoy the article!

I don't know about where you live, but here in Virginia the foliage is in peak season.  It just seems like the perfect time to get outside and do some observations.  It's time to touch, smell and notice! So how can we turn our observations into descriptive writing?  In the new "Science-Centered Language Development" research developed by FOSS ( www.fossweb.com ) authors suggest that through observations of living organisms, an environment, an object or phenomenon we can recapture the sensory images clearly into very descriptive writing.  So how do we start?  We start with a walk outside to observe a particular object or area.  Have the students take note of what they see, smell, hear, notice, etc... I have created a worksheet based on the suggestions by FOSS and the scaffold that they suggest. The frame sentences look something like this: I observed ________________.  When I touch the _________ I feel _______________.  The ______has ____.  I noticed _____.  It feels _

As announced in a recent post, the whole sick crew spent last weekend in Cleveland at the jointly-located 4S, HSS, and SHOT meetings. Dividing our time differently between the three hotels (and various local watering holes), we each got our own snapshot of the state of the field(-s) today. To my mind, two themes characterized some of the best panels: (1) the materia l culture of theories and (2) the structural power of metaphors . I hope a co-blogger will touch on the former as featured at "Making Mathematics," a panel widely lauded as one of the weekend's best. For my part, I'll describe the latter theme as it emerged in a Sunday panel on "Bodies, Colonies, and Stem Cells." Each of the three papers – by Ben Hurlbut , Hallam Stevens (the organizer), and our very own Lukas Rieppel – dealt with the link between social and scientific categories. That's a sloppy way to label a subtle conversation, but I think the panelists (along with their commentator,

Grab your gravity boots, h old on to your wigs and keys, and have us pour you  a cosmic cocktail . . . The Secret Science Club shatters the space-time continuum with a special live screening of physicist Brian Greene’s NOVA: The Fabric of the Cosmos---The Illusion of Time .  Is “time” nothing more than a product of our imaginations? Join us as we hurtle 50 years into the future, then step into a wormhole to travel back to the Big Bang —where the ultimate secrets of time may be hidden. PLUS! B last off into the stratosphere with an awesome pre-screening lecture and Q&A  on the "Anatomy of the Universe" with  Munier Salem of Columbia University's Astronomy Public Outreach Program Before & After --Groove to tunes from another dimension --Imbibe a rocket-fueled cosmic cocktail! (It’ll knock you into orbit . . .) --Enter our spacey trivia contest and score celestial prizes This intergalactic edition of the Secret Science Club meets Wednesday, November 9, 8 pm @

What a crazy week I've had...Phew! First we had Halloween, then we had Math/Science night at our school.  Speaking of Math & Science night, what do you do at your school? We have several things going on: First, our 5th graders display their science fair projects . Over the years, we have changed our approach from a home-based project (where usually parents research and plan it!) to a cooperative group inschool project.  The students worked in groups of threes to choose an idea to test.  Then they planned it, tested it and wrote it up according to the "Scientific Method."  Now, with Nature of Science becoming more of a factor than the lock-step scientific method, I am sure they will change again to take on an even more child centered approach.  Here are some pictures of a few projects.  Can't you tell they were done by students?  I love them! Next we have the Science Club Display.   This includes all the finished products from our EarthQuake club.  The two leveled

Here is another technique that I knew...but may have forgotten.  Back in the days when I taught k-2, I always made charts and used color.  I still do...but then, I was more interactive. I would often give students a word card and have them place it on a big book page, or in a pocket chart or even on a chart.  Why did I never think to do this with upper grades?  Here is another strategy I "re-learned" at the FOSS embedded language workshop.  Why not take the information from your study guide and make a review chart on it?  Then hand out the vocab cards and have the kids tape them in the right spot? You can use it more than once...simply take the cards off and do it again. Our students with limited language knowledge really benefit from the repetition, the color and the concrete application.  Next, I stepped it up a notch and added one for a scientific diagram.  Here in Virginia, we have to teach the students all the names of the part of the flower.  It is REALLY HARD for me to