My Students Discover Team, nicknamed Team Dirt, worked in the Genomics Lab of the NC Museum of Natural Sciences.  We were working on the Citizen Science Project entitled Muddy Microbes.  Our team consisted of myself, 6th grade science teacher, Arthina Blanchard, 7th grade math teacher, and Amy Lawson, 8th grade science teacher.  Team Dirt worked very well together during our three week externship at the science museum.  We learned many new skills and had excellent opportunities to enrich ourselves as teaching professionals both in the lab and also conducting field work.

Our first challenge when writing our curriculum is taking the lab work like DNA extraction, gel electrophoresis, and PCRs and relating those skills to a middle school classroom.  We obviously don’t have the equipment to actually do these activities in the classroom, nor is that the intent.  With the help of our mentors in the lab we identified activities that can be adapted to the middle school classroom.  We will also continue to have access to the museum lab and will send our citizen science work to the lab and receive data back that we can then analyze and use in our classrooms.

Throughout the three weeks while working in the lab, our team would brainstorm ideas about curriculum and identify different ways we could bring this experience back into the classroom.  During the last week when we actually began putting pen to paper and writing our curriculum the biggest challenge was trying to incorporate all three grade level’s standards into our lesson.  We decided to write our curriculum unit entitled DIRT IS ALIVE beginning with a lesson that all three of us could teach at the beginning of the year  -Diggin’ Dandelions.  Implementation of this lesson will introduce Citizen Science to our students and set the tone for the entire year.  We then identified standards in each of our grade levels that can be taught using the Citizen Science project.  We are each working on lessons that can be taught in our grade that align with our specific curriculum as part of the Dirt is Alive unit.  For example I will have two additional lessons (What is Soil and Biomes Around the World) that will be taught later in the  year that connect to the Citizen Science Project.

Writing curriculum can be overwhelming and when we first started I wasn’t sure how we were going to make all three grade levels fit into our Dirt is Alive unit. I now see a clearer picture of how this will work.  I think having all three grade levels incorporated will add depth to the unit.  I love the idea of starting with the Diggin’ Dandelions lesson that we have submitted as our unit draft and then adding the additional lessons for each grade level that will be taught under the Diggin’ Dandelions umbrella.  This will allow the students to continue connecting to the Citizen Science Project throughout the year.

This week Team Dirt discovered quite a few curriculum connections that we can make with our experience at the science museum this summer.  Our team is represented by  all three middle school grades 6th, 7th and 8th grades along with the two disciplines of science and math.  We identified several curriculum objectives that can be met as we conduct Dr. Julia Steven’s Dandelion Project in our classrooms. Some of the related 6th & 8th grade topics from the  NC Science Essential Standards include:   soil makeup, symbiosis, ecosystems, helpful and harmful bacteria and biomes.  We also discussed many math connections including ratios, percents, graphing, scatter plots, and quadratics which tie into the 7th Grade and Math 1 standards.  To help with writing our unit plan, we created a google doc that lists all the standards that can be addressed through this project in all three areas (6th science, 8th science and 7th math).

I envision setting up the dandelion project right at the beginning of the year along with introducing the big idea of Citizen Science.  At this time I will invite our mentor, Dr. Julia Stevens, to come to the classroom and let the students meet the “real scientist” in person.  I think this will be a great way to kick off the year and excite the students with the understanding that they will actually be helping Dr. Stevens with her research.  We will be able to continue this connection with the SMARTS distance learning tool to video conference with the scientists at the museum.

We plan to have our students conduct the dandelion experiments in the classroom.  They will bring in soil from their own neighborhoods and we will explore the bacteria and fungi that are present and address the main question – Can dandelions recruit their own microbiome in these new soils? From this initial activity I’m sure many more student inquires will follow.

Once the soil is brought in, students will find dandelions on the school grounds and after sterilizing the roots, will plant the dandelions in the soils they brought from home.  The students will care for the dandelion plants and when time we will send the root and surrounding soil to the museum for analysis.  We obviously don’t have the equipment to extract DNA or run PCR so this is a great advantage to be connected to the museum.  Once the samples have been analyzed Dr. Stevens will send the results back to us so we can use for further inquiry in the classroom.

I’m excited about the idea of my students doing “real science” in the classroom and having this connection with the museum and scientist working there. During our reflection lunch on Friday I was thrilled to hear, Dr. Rob Dunn, say “The hours in the lab diminish, but the scope shouldn’t.”  He made it very clear that we were welcome to come back to the museum and use the lab facilities as the need arises.  I feel like I am truly a Teacher-Scientist in a partnership with the museum to create more Citizen Scientists in my classroom, school, state and as Rob says “throughout the world.”  I can’t wait to kick off this new school year!

Day 5 – July 7, 2014

We began our week at Prairie Ridge searching for dandelions to use in our dandelion microbiome research project.  It was a challenge,  but we finally found and dug up over 30 dandelions.  Once back at the museum, Julia bleached the roots and Amy, Arthina and I each took turns sifting the soils we brought from home and replanted the dandelions in this soil. It will be interesting to see if the dandelions can reestablish the microbes in the new soil.

Next, our team created a display to put in the window of the Genomics Lab.  The display showed the steps of our project and communicated the main research question:  Will dandelions find symbiosis in our sample soils?  It is cool to have a display in the museum!

Day 6 – July 8, 2014

Today we learned more from Dr. Julie Urban about PCR (polymerase chain reaction) and how the thermal cycler uses a heating and cooling cycle to replicate the DNA.   As two of us met with Dr. Urban we each took turns working with our mentor, Julia to learn the process of DNA extraction.  We used  the soils we collected around the museum block to practice extracting the DNA.  i choose the soil found around the Rachel Carson statue as my practice soil (thinking it would give me good results – ha).  Once we had all extracted the DNA from our soils, Julia showed us the NanoDrop machine that would measure the concentration and quality of our samples.  I was so excited to see that my Rachel Carson sample had a high quality result and so did Amy and Arthina’s sample.  To end the day we set up the PCR mixture and put it in the thermal cycler – anxious to see our first PCR results tomorrow.

Day 7 – July 9, 2014

Today we are going to run our first gel!  We first learned how to create a gel for electrophoresis.   We then put our DNA into the gel and ran the electricity through it which allows us to see if we ran the correct DNA strands for sequencing.  Unfortunately we were not successful running our first gel – Julia thinks we may have left out the Taq – a key ingredient in the solution mixed with the DNA 🙁  We will try again tomorrow.

Julia had an innovative idea to create an agar made from our soils, so we learned how to make Soil Agar today.  We ended our day having fun looking at the agar plates full of bacteria from the soils we collected from around the museum.  We used the dissecting scope to view the plates and talked about how our students would also enjoy exploring this part of the project.

Day 8 – July 10, 2014

Today we created our PCR and ran our gels again … success!!   Below is a photo of our successful gel and we joked about how proud we were – almost like a baby’s sonogram:)

We had good time today to talk about curriculum connections.  We met with Julia in the conference room and she shared  two great Next Generation Sequencing Data programs:  MG-RAST & STAMP.  These will be very useful during the school year when we receive the data back from Juila and begin the process of analyzing the data about different bacteria and fungi found in our soil samples.

Next we enjoyed a Daily Planet talk from Dr. Julie Urban entitled Bugs in Bugs:  Symbiosis.  Her talk was intriguing about planthoppers that have cells in their bodies just for bacteria.   The Bobtail Squid was another symbiotic example showing how they have bioluminescent bacteria in their eyes which helps to cloak them from predators.

We finished our day by making three batches of agar:  soil agar with bacteria, soil agar with fungi,  and nutrient agar

 Day 9 – July 11,2014

Today we had a Skype discussion with Dr. Meg Lowman.  She is a scientist at Cal-Tech but formerly worked at the science museum and helped to write the NSF grant for the Student’s Discover Project.  She was very interested to talk with each Student’s Discover team about our progress and how we see using this experience in our classroom.

The entire Student’s Discover Team met with Liz Baird to reflect on week two.  Some of the topics discussed include:  curriculum connections; working in teams at the museum and how to replicate the rich learning experience that we’ve received for future teachers.  All the Kenan Fellows sitting around the table agreed that we have hit the jackpot of externships – the experience at the museum continues to be top notch!

Later that day we plated more of our soil samples on three different types of agar.  At the end of the day, Julia asked us about extending the dandelion experiment to a month instead of a week to allow the dandelions to strongly establish themselves before we take the soil samples.  I thought it was really cool that Julia was actually interested in our input about this change and we made the decision mentor with mentees.  We checked on our precious dandelions one more time before we ended another fabulous week at the museum.

I was so excited about all the new technology tools that I learned at NCCAT … Arusma, Twiducate, Foursquare, pheed, Poll Everywhere, Socrative, Educreations just to name a few.  I returned home and my enthusiasm to implement some of the new technology this year in my classroom was tempered with the reality of no hardware.  This is the biggest challenge for using technology in my classroom!  My school does have laptop carts, but it’s difficult to consistently have these available in the classroom and I’d love to have technology in my students hands on a daily basis.

One solution to this problem is to have students bring their own devices (BYOD).  I started this as a trial in 4th quarter of last school year with some success.  I also plan to look for grant money to purchase either ipads or chrome books to have available for each lab group in class and hope to eventually build so that we have hardware available for each pair of students.

The above picture is Day 1 in the Genomics and Microbiology Lab at NC Science Museum with my mentor, Dr. Julia Stevens.  Dr. Stevens asked each of us to bring three soil samples from our neighborhood to use in the Dandelion Microbiome Project .

I’ve come to the end of my first week as part of the Kenan Fellows Students Discover Team at the North Carolina Science Museum. If I had only one word to describe my experience it would be MAGNIFICENT. Someone in our group summed up the experience as if they’d died and gone to science teacher’s heaven and I couldn’t agree more.

Day 1 – June 30, 2014
We began our week at Prairie Ridge Ecostation and met with our teams of mentors and fellows. Liz Baird, director of education programs at the museum, facilitated a conversation with the group as we shared our hopes, fears and expectations about the journey we were getting ready to take together. It was a great time of sharing and listening as we discussed openly our thoughts about the Students Discover Project.

Next we met with Chris Godforth, Prairie Ridge director, who guided us as we participated in the Citizen Science Dragonfly Swarm Project. We had fun observing dragonflys and collecting data to contribute to this project. We worked up an appetite observing dragonflys and were ready to enjoy a catered lunch by Neomande.

After lunch we drove to the museum and upon arrival I was immediately made to feel welcome in my home for the next three weeks. Liz Baird gave us a tour of the museum and each Students Discover Team was introduced to their lab. My team, nicknamed Team Dirt, is working in the Genomics and Microbiology Lab on Exploring the Dandelion Microbiome with Dr. Julia Stevens.

Our day ended with a Daily Planet talk by Dr. Rob Dunn who explained the entire Citizen Science project and shared his vision for how this project could scale throughout the state, country and even the world. I left my first day at the museum so excited to be a part of this project and couldn’t wait to return the next day!

Day 2 – July 1, 2014
Our day began with our mentor Dr. Juila Stevens and Dan Fergus, mentor of the face mites project. We met in the conference room and learned about the molecular methods used in extracting DNA, and PCR(Polymerase Chain Reaction). A bit of a brain strain as we reviewed cell structure and learned procedures for extracting DNA and PCR reaction involving temperature cycles, primers, nucleotides, and gel electrophoresis. We then got to go back to the Genomics and Microbiology Lab and do some science – yay! Our team learned how to create and plate nutrient agar in preparation for our first soil samples that we collected around the museum block.

At the end of the day, we enjoyed a Daily Planet talk from Dr. Bucky Gates and then toured the Palentology Lab and learned more about his Citizen Science Fossil Project.

Day 3 – July 2, 2014
We began this day with another tutoring session from our mentors Julia and Dan and learned lots about DNA sequencing. Next, my mentor, Dr. Julia Stevens gave a Daily Planet talk on Exploring the Dandelion Microbiome. I was interested to hear more about her project and what my team would be working on in the coming weeks.

Roland Kays, the director of the Biodiversity Lab hosted a round table talk with all the Student Discover Kenan Fellows and his student interns. The topic was How to Reach Middle School Kids. They were very interested in tapping into our expertise in the classroom about what is working with students at this age level. It was fun to be the experts in this conversation and share knowledge from the classroom with the museum. Topics around the table included flipping the classroom, use of technology tools, and limited time with lecture.
The highlight of the day was a visit from NPR’s Frank Stasio who recorded his program The State of Things about the Students Discover Program at the NC Science Musuem. Amy Lawson, one of my teammates on Team Dirt, was interviewed along with Dr. Rob Dunn, and Dr. Julie Urban. Amy did a fabulous job discussing how this Citizen Science initiative with the Students Discover team can positively impact the middle school science classroom.

We ended our day by preparing the soil samples by adding soil to the Phosphate Buffered Solution (PBS), centrifuge the mixture, pipette the solution with bacteria cells on to the agar plates, and incubate the bacteria. It will be interesting to see what is growing!
The museum was buzzing with activity today!

Day 4 – July 3, 2014
To begin our day, Team Dirt was invited to sit in on a job talk given by Danielle N. Lee who was completing the interview process for Assisstant Director of the Biodiversity Lab. It was very interesting to participate in this phase of the interview process.
Team Dirt was then put to the task to create more nutrient agar this time on our own. We successfully plated and labeled the agar.
Liz Baird, director of education at the museum, invited all of the Kenan Fellows working on the Students Discover projects to eat lunch together and reflect on our week. During this conversation it became so apparent to me that I am part of something great … I feel we are on the cusp of changing the face of science in the middle school classroom and I simply can’t wait for week two at the museum!