Imagine my surprise when I am sitting in back to school PD and a fellow teacher presents something identical to mite research that I had observed during my Bayer experience. A slight difference was that trees were being used instead of mites. How could mites and trees even remotely resemble each other? The teacher had arbitrarily selected something that could be copy and pasted all over a piece of paper. Students were tasked with estimating how many trees were on the page. The teacher led us through different strategies and ways that students could use equations to determine how many trees were on the page. All that I could see were the quadrants that bee researchers used in the Bee Care center to count mites.

A strategy used by researchers to help count all of the mites is to break up the samples into quadrants so that the total number of mites can be estimated with greater accuracy. Sure enough, the teacher proceeded to present examples of students who had broken up their page of trees into different area to help count the trees on the page. So I started thinking how neat it would be to do this lesson with my students and use the mite example to help students see how research use some of the same skills they are capable of, even as fifth graders.

I developed a lesson plan that can be found by clicking on this link to share at the district level: Mites Lesson. My students have not yet arrived and I can already see how I will be able to use my summer experience to enrich learning for my students. Had I not had the fellowship I did, I would never have made this connection while the teacher was presenting.