This Kenan Fellowship and Student Discover adventure at the Museum has been a great time to rejuvenate my teaching soul.  I’m getting excited about building projects for my students to complete as scientists. Team Dirt and I have been talking curriculum all week. Yesterday we hashed out quite a few ideas and have nailed quite a few of them into place,  at least with one nail, hammered in about half way……

So far we known that students at Mills Park Middle School in Wake County will be on an Edmodo with Burgaw Middle School students in Pender County.  In Edmodo the students will be able to discuss and share their awesome adventures into Citizen Science. They will also have assignments that must be completed and turned in through Edmodo.  This part of the lesson will teach students about their global world. They will be able to connect with other students in their state, and they will be able to talk about their science experiments as scientists.

Another way that students will see how they are connecting to their community and global world is by getting to meet the scientists that work in the lab. Next year in our classes the students will get to meet Dr. Julia Stevens when she comes to visit our schools, but they will also get to use a distance learning tool to video conference with Dr. Stevens and Dr. Urban in the museum lab. Students will get to talk and interact with the scientists and see their own personal results being shown to them from within the lab.

The next part that we have decided upon, is to try to make our project a Project Based Learning experience that can be used as an interdisciplinary unit if teachers of all subjects will buy in to the lesson and help.  Students will be doing science experiments in science class.  This experiment will have the students bringing soil from their communities into the classroom to find out what bacteria and fungi are present, and which ones dandelions will gain in their own “microbiome.” Students will then go around the school and collect dandelions to sterilize their roots and replant into the student’s soil.  Then the students will grow and observe the dandelions until we collect the roots and the soil to be sent back to the museum lab for testing.

As the students are growing the dandelions we will be able to discuss and learn about photosynthesis, the nitrogen cycle, symbiosis, harmful and helpful bacteria, food webs, ecosystems, populations, species, and taxonomy.  All of these things will be explored in our research project, and all of them tie in with the current 8th grade NC Science Essential Standards.  We will also be able to tie in soil, photosynthesis, and biomes which are  in the 6th grade NC Science Essential standards  Also, there is a lot of ratios, percents, graphing, scatter plots, and quadratics which tie in to 7th Grade and Math 1 standards.