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Have you ever really stopped to think about the first men on the moon?  It's pretty cool to think about what happened 43 years ago in 1969.... NASA eclips is a great place to find video clips that are research based and not fake! Yes, I spent a while googling Apollo moon landing on YouTube to find a bunch of ....well, junk.  However, this clip is amazing!  It was actually made for high school students, but I found it very friendly for 4th/5th graders.  The clip is called History in the Making.   Once you get the kids hooked on the Apollo mission, then you may want to continue on with future moon exploration videos.  I recommend:  Nasa's new moon robot   to learn more about the future of moon exploration as well as Nasa's Lunar Habitat Structure. Just looking for a good video clip on the moon?  I recommend Our World:  The Moon.   There is so much more to search for on the NASA website...I only wish I had the time to use it all!

A few days back, I had a request to share with ya'll how I show scale models of the solar system.  Once again, Seeds of Science has an excellent model that I loved.  In the program, they have a printed sheet with the sun and the planets scaled down to be shown at 10 billion times smaller than the actual size.  (Imagine that!)   Unfortunately, it is copy written and I can not share it for free with you guys.  Sorry! However, I can tell you what we do....We went outside with a our picture cards. This is the sun.  I asked a student holding Mercury to go where he thinks he should be near the sun.  The students automatically thought they should be right on top of the sun. In truth, the student needed to be about 6 meters away from the sun.  Next, Venus was about 11 meters away from the sun.  Earth was 15 meters away from the sun and Mars was 23 meters away. Wow...the next planet is Jupiter and that is 50+meters away...too far away to show outside in our school yard.  In fact, we discuss

  Do you teach the planets?  We have just added them back into our curriculum and I am so glad that we did!  We have spent the past two weeks learning about rotation and revolution of the earth and the moon.  We also talked about the surface of both areas...we were able to compare and contrast what they looked like and felt like.  The students quickly learned that even though there are rocks, mountains and valleys like Earth - without air and water, there is little chance for life.  Astronauts must wear special suits to exist on the moon for even a short period of time.  But what about the other planets?  We are using Seeds of Science's unit Planets and Moons which has a wonderful collection of planet trading cards.  If you do not have the kit, you can down load some from NASA here.   They are a lot larger than the ones that Seeds provides, but they do work. The kids spent the day reading and sorting the cards - first on their own, then by size, surface features and distance from t

I have a new passion...those of you who follow my blog know how much I love and use science notebooks.  Recently I stumbled across a resource for Nature Journals from a blogger who uses this for homeschooling.  Her resources are amazing!! Check out Handbook of Nature Study for a ton of ideas including the outdoor hour challenges, seasonal nature walks and my favorite Nature Journals. The idea of Nature journals is to go outside with a focus for the day and sit and draw what you see.  The kids I work with found it very relaxing and continued to do it on the weekends too!  Here are a few pictures of my students nature journals from my after school club... I see myself spending many hours this summer sitting and observing nature...at the beach, in my yard and at the local parks.  I certainly can not wait....

The Inspiration: A Toronto Raccoon, photo by Michael Pettit The Forum for the History of Science in America's newsletter regularly prints conversations between accomplished scholars in the history of American science and younger historians. In the most recent number, ( PDF available here ) FHSA editor, Dan Bouk (Me!), claimed the privilege to speak with 2011 FHSA Article Prize winner, Michael Pettit . We enjoyed ourselves and hope you'll enjoy listening in, so to speak. There is something for everyone: Raccoons (so cute!);  history of psychology and the human sciences (so cerebral!); Canadian institutions for HOS (so interdisciplinary!); and even a few musings on the intersection of HOS with environmental science (so relevant to the discussion Lukas introduced here !) Bouk: Mike, I can see why the committee awarded you the FHSA article prize for 2011. Yours is a fascinating article ( download here ). One thing that struck me was that it lives in liminal spaces in a variety of

I have loved working with my after school group of naturalists.  We have become immersed in our Nature Journals...my newest passion from the blog Handbook of Nature Study.  Today was our final meeting and we spent time once again observing the forest outside.  We started with a clip from YouTube:  Planted Earth - Seasonal Forests. We then created mini field guides from the UK site Nature Detectives.   I printed off a copy of the mini beasts picture sort and glued them into our Nature Journals.   We prepared to go into the woods in search of insects! We took:  our Nature Journals, colored pencils, our "sit spot", bug boxes, tweezers and magnifying glasses. Our sit spot is a square cut from a clear plastic shower curtain. It is great for sitting down on the wet ground for a long period of time! We found interesting plants and insects to sketch in our journals. We love to wander deeper in the woods in search of bugs and plants.... Success!  We collected ants, spiders, saw a

This week is my first state test in reading.  I know the kids are ready, but it is always a nail biter at the end.  Don't you agree??  In science we have been studying moon phases and have come across some wonderful on-line sites that I would love to share with you.  Have you seen????  Moon Phases from the History Channel that is available on You Tube? What about this site?  Neo Kids....  This has a great drag and drop to practice labeling the phases.  Great for a smart board.  They also have several short clips that are engaging! Seeds of Science uses this awesome simulation !  We love it... you can simulate the lunar phases with an animation while watching the moon phases on the side. Another favorite website is the Farmer's Almanac . It has been updated to meet the needs of 21st Century learners with videos, pictures and simulations of the moon.  Enjoy it!

We just started our last science unit of the year:  Planets and Moons by the Lawrence Hall of Science and Seeds of Science. In case you don't know, these science curriculum units are interdisciplinary - combining reading, writing and science to make a very full program.  I love them!  This unit starts by investigating models.   The first model the students investigate is the "Mt. Nose" model.  Using their head as a model of the Earth, they explore what happens to Mt. Nose when the sphere is rotating.  The students stand in a circle and face a light bulb (we use our lamp with out the lampshade).  As we rotate we notice that our mountain is in full sunlight, sunset, full darkness, and sunrise.  The students learn that rotating just means spinning. Next we introduce the model of an inflatable globe.  The students work to label four points across the earth (Hawaii, Thailand, Egypt and Florida).  Then we observe what happens when those models rotate.  They also look for day

Last week’s announcement that Nevada had OK’d Google to license driverless cars  in the state reminded me of another story from last year in which an agency within the US federal government claimed that cell phone use is addictive. As autonomous vehicles and partly autonomous technologies—such as frontal crash warning systems that apply the brakes for you if you are about to rear-end someone—continue to improve, advocates of these technologies may well see opportunistic advantage in current talk about distraction and distractibility.   Look, Mom, No Hands! I am particularly interested in what historians of science and technology and STS scholars have to add to these debates. More specifically, when I read and hear news stories on these topics, I see a dynamic that has become a central obsession of mine, and  which forms the basis of my book manuscript on the history of auto regulation. As we redefine how we understand problems, we also often change our notions of how to solve them. Sh

In case you haven't noticed, I truly am a naturalist.  I enjoy all types of science teaching...but as for myself, I honestly enjoy being outside among nature...looking at plants, animals and the earth.  I am a fan of Jane Goodall because she learned so much by simply watching. I started a new club at our school for other kids (like me) that I call Green Hornets.  I chose the name because our school mascot is the hornet and green because it is an ecology club.  I thought it would be catchy!  We are using the theme of forests as our first project.  We have taken the kids into (shocker!) the woods where we looked at the infrastructure of the forest, we identified the types of leaves and trees that grow in our schoolyard and searched for signs of wildlife that may inhabit the area.  Another day we learned about the white tailed deer.  They are abundant in Virginia and we see them everywhere. A fun activity that we participated in I got from Suzie Gilly with the Department of Game and

Continuing our ruminations on the history of capitalism and its relationship to the history of science/med/tech or to STS ( here ) ( here ) (and here ), I think we might find some useful categories of analysis in Jeffrey Sklansky's recent historiographical essay from Modern Intellectual History (Vol. 9, no. 1, 2012). Sklansky's piece, "The Elusive Sovereign: New Intellectual and Social Histories of Capitalism," (requires subscription) does what great historiographical works should do: it covers and categorizes a wide literature using analytical categories that shed new light on the assembled works; it reads recent scholarly trends perceptively; and it points the way toward fruitful new avenues of research and analysis. I'll summarize Sklansky's approach to each of these aspects, but for our purposes, I will note this first: Sklansky's analysis suggests to me that the history of capitalism as currently practiced already shares deep affinities with our own

You may have noticed that I am very proud of our outdoor classroom space....As I have stated a million times, it is all due to our wonderful local Master Gardeners .  If any of you are considering taking this project on, I highly recommend you contact them through your local extension centers.  If you click on the link above, there is a data base telling you where they are located in your state.  Master Gardeners have to do community service as part of the program.  They are usually looking for volunteer hours and would love to help out.  My Master Gardener secured the grant through Kohl's to provide money for the materials, organized the whole building process, waters the garden all through the year and into the summer when we are gone and even started an after school Garden Club for the kids.  So check into this resource if you are seriously considering a garden at your school. SherriA asked me how we put a whiteboard outside in our garden.  She was wondering if the weather woul

Yesterday, I awoke to two announcements. First, Steve Shapin is giving a talk in England at the end of the month called " The Tastes of Wine: Towards a Cultural History ." Second, next week is " American Craft Beer Week ." Here's the announcement for that: These two events have more in common than alcohol and my inbox. Shapin's argument that oenophiles constitute an evolving "taste community" is increasingly true for craft beer in the United States. While not amenable to Shapin's longue-durée  approach, craft brewing provides an alternative view of technology, economics, and aesthetics – capitalism, you might say! – with a peculiarly American flavor. Check out that promotional video. It's all flags and amber waves of grain – Benedict Anderson in a pint glass. And the pride is well-placed: as announced at last week's  Craft Brewer's Conference , the industry posted a 15% retail spike in 2011, reaching 5% of the domestic market by vol

Like many people in the history of science and technology, I am deeply interested in the history and cultural work of popular science, including magazines, books, TV shows, and now webpages and podcasts. I hope to offer some reflections on pop science over the coming months and also to highlight some web-based works on science that historians and other critical thinkers have created. I wanted to start with some thoughts on a truly great pop science program, the WNYC (National Public Radio) show,  Radiolab . And I particularly want to think through its relationship to common-sense, something that all popular communications must consider. Radiolab began production in 2004. It features co-hosts Jad Abumrad, who received a MacArthur "genius" grant for the work in 2011, and Robert Krulwich. From the beginning, the show experimentally pushed the bounds of radio sound design, which had already achieved new heights in programs like This American Life and Studio 360. Abumrad and Krulw

I am a huge fan of taking kids outdoors...as a child, I spent many ideas wandering in the woods, chasing fairies and bunnies, dreaming of a magical world.  I've watched my own sons play for hours in the sand, running barefoot in the grass and catching fireflies at dusk.  Quite frankly, our kids need to turn off the machines and get outside!!! Since summer is coming up, you may be looking for some good ideas to get outside.  The best resource I have found is from the United Kingdom... Nature Detectives.   You can find all kinds of downloads there for FREE!  You can get tree identification sheets, activities for each season, minibeasts (insects and other small animals), ticklists (which are like lists of items you see in the woods), notebook sheets for observation, scavenger hunts, pond dipping, etc... the list goes on and on!  Enjoy the woods...and get outside!

Lee kicked of a lively discussion Friday as he wondered what the history of capitalism had to say to the history of technology, (medicine?), environment, and science (HoTeES, or HoTMeS?). Lee postulated that the interactions of capitalism/political economy and science might be expected within the realms of shared problems and jointly produced tools . I wrote a dissertation about "tools for discrimination" and the "science of difference," wherein life insurers are shown to be important sponsors of investigations into human difference---so I am on board. To help me judge Lee's hypothesis, I would like to offer a few posts over the next week that point to intersections between these two fields (HofCapitalism, HofScience/Tech/Med/Env). Let's get empirical, so to speak! A different sort of account book, but an accounting nonetheless---from Samuel Blodget's Economica: A Statistical Manual for the United States of America (1806) Evidence 1: Caitlin Rosenthal