ingridscience

Weather and Seasons

Summary
Model/discuss why we get seasons. Activities on weather. Model seasonal Indigenous food gathering.
Materials

Materials in the activities

Procedure

Lesson on Seasons and seasonal Indigenous food harvesting (good for Ks):
Measure temperature using coloured sheets and wind at two stations.
Discuss how the weather changes with the season.
Discuss how Indigenous harvesting methods change with the season, and model clam baskets.

Lesson on Weather for grade 1s:
Model why we get seasons.
Set up frost.
Two stations to measure temperature and wind.
">Lightening model.

Grades taught
Gr K
Gr 1

Physical changes in Buttered popcorn

Summary
Make butter and popcorn, discussing the physical changes in each. Act out what the molecules are doing as popcorn pops.
Materials

Materials in the activities

Procedure

Act out molecules, so that students are familiar with what the particles are doing in solids, liquids and gases.

Make butter in a circle together, describing each stage in physical terms.
Cream has fat molecules floating in a watery white liquid (the white is casein protein clumps).
Shake the cream in a jar, to shake in air bubbles. Whipped cream is formed (open the jar to show). The molecules are the same but are reorganized - there are now bubbles of air molecules mixed in with the fat and water molecules of the cream.
As we shake more, the fat molecules in the cream gather together to make one big lump - butter!
The proteins and milk sugar molecules mix in with the water molecules, to make 'buttermilk'.

Make popcorn.
While the teacher is preparing the popcorn, first watch video of popcorn kernals bursting open in slow motion, then students prepare a skit to show what the molecules are doing as popcorn pops.
Watch the skits.

Dump the popcorn in a large bowl to salt it, and put the butter in the still-warm pot to melt it.
Distribute popcorn in little cups, with a small amount of melted butter poured over each.

Grades taught
Gr 2
Gr 3

Heat radiation lamp

Summary
Use an infrared heat lamp to demonstrate heat transfer by radiation. Add in heat sensitive sheets to add in heat transfer by conduction.
Materials
  • infra red lamp, 250W, like this one - 3 for a class
  • fixtures for the lamps, with extension cords
  • small sheet of glass
  • small sheet of plexi
  • cardstock
  • small piece of foam core
  • optional (be careful): garbage bag
  • plastic box
  • water
  • mirror
  • not essential but adds a free play element: heat sensitive sheets
  • shields to keep students at least 20cm from the lamps (so they don't destroy the heat sensitive sheets) - cardboard shield idea pictured
  • IR images (see procedure for links)
Procedure

Note: parts of this activity are in proto type stage (indicated)

Heat radiation demonstration
Use an infra red heat lamp on an upright fixture, so the teacher can pick it up, and it can also be stood upright in the centre of a circle of students.
(An indandescent bulb also gives off a lot of heat, mostly by radiation. 1/8 of its heat energy is by conduction and convection.)
Turn the lamp on and walk past the students so that they can feel the heat coming from the bulb.
Tell them that this lamp gives off some light (which we can see) and also heat (which we can't see).
The heat is called radiation, and is a kind of radiation called Infra red. (Some other kinds of radiation (visible and UV) can heat things up.)
Although we can't see heat radiation, we can still sense it - we can feel it.
The sun gives off radiation. Radiation can travel through space with no air. (The other kinds of heat movement, conduction and convection, need particles of matter to happen.)

Look at IR images together
Many materials give off radiation.
Car: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/IR_moving_car.jpg
Dog: https://animalwellnessmagazine.com/dogs-noses-detect-heat/
House: https://tedkinsman.photoshelter.com/image/I00000BT15x1yhIQ or https://www.loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=12-P13-00046&segmentI…
Water rescue (scroll down): https://www.flir.com/discover/marine/first-respondents/maritime-public-…
Andromeda galaxy (4th image down): https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/30990

Demo: Heat radiation can pass through some materials and not others
Use heat sensitive paper to show heat. As it heats up the heat sensitive sheet turns from black to red, orange, yellow, green, blue, then black again. Demonstrate that the sheet turns colours when placed near the infra red heat lamp.
Does radiation pass through glass - do you get warm through a window? (It might be hard to remember, or separate what you remember from what you think should happen.) [Yes] Show with the heat sensitive sheet on the other side of the glass from the lamp.
Does radiation pass through plastic? Show with plexi sheet. [Yes]
Cardboard? [No]
Through water? Show it does pass through the plastic box, then add water to the box.

Just like visible light, infra red heat radiation can bounce off mirrors.
Hold the mirror so that infra red from the heat lamp reflects off the mirror and onto the heat sensitive sheet.

Free play radiation and conduction
Before the lesson: Space the the heat lamps around the classroom, minimizing wires to be tripped over (as students will be walking around the classroom a lot).
Before the lesson: Set up a shield so that the students cannot bring a heat sensitive sheet closer than 20cm to the lamp (not prototyped yet).
Hand heat sensitive sheets to students, and allow them to explore them for a while.
Discuss how heat moves from your hand to the sheet, to make it turn colours. Your hand and the sheet are touching - the heat moves between them by conduction.
Air is also touching the sheet and conducts heat away from it - there are molecules in the air that bounce into the sheet and take some of its energy and cool it down again.

Show students how to charge their sheet with the radiation from the heat lamp. Include a shield around the lamp (idea pictured), so students don't hold them too close and destroy them.
Then quickly touch it to materials in the classroom, to see how the heat leaves the sheet by conduction. Make sure the coloured side of the sheet is up, so you can see it change.
Allow students to explore.
After the radiation from the heat lamp heated the sheet up, which materials in the classroom conducted the heat away quickly, and which ones slowly? What patterns did you make on your heat sensitive sheets, when different parts of an object took heat away at different rates?

Notes

Need half hour to set up heat lamp charging stations for heat sensitive sheets

Grades taught
Gr 2
Gr 3
Gr 4

Animal adaptations for Primaries

Summary
Choose activities from modeling how different animals eat, comparing animal skulls and skeletons, build animals with fins and wings.
skeletons, barnacles, wings and fins, eye cards
Procedure

Set up activities as stations or for the whole class to work on.

Introduction and focus
Animals need to 1. find food, and 2. run away and hide from other animals that want to eat them.
Animal 'adaptations', or their features help them do this so that they can stay alive.

Activity descriptions:

In a circle, carefully pass around prey and predator skulls, looking at the shape of the teeth, then the placement of the eyes, and for how they help an animal find food, and escape being eaten.

Model different ways that animals eat with animal eating styles activity (grabbing, stabbing, sucking, sieving).
Review the different tools that students tried with images of animals eating in the different ways.

Find camouflaged animals in photos. Camouflage helps animals hide from predators, as well as hiding to get closer to prey.

Some animals don't have legs. They have wings (like a bird) or fins (like a fish).
Build fins and wings onto playdough bodies to create your own winged/finned animal.
Look at a sheet of birds and fish drawings for real examples and ideas.

Build a skeleton of a deer or look at a snake skeleton. Compare how the skeleton is different from ours, and how each of our skeletons help us survive.

Look at barnacles feeding - they don't have legs and they can't move, but they have their own adaptations to eat and survive.

Look at pictures of different animal eyes - so many shapes and colours, but all for seeing surroundings, finding food and avoiding predators.
e.g. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Animal-Eyes.jpg (but no labels!)

Grades taught
Gr K
Gr 1
Gr 2
Gr 3

Earth, Sun and Moon Positions and their Effects

Summary
Model the Phases of the Moon and the Seasons. Activities on the effects of the Seasons on living things.
Materials
  • Space that can be made completely dark
  • Materials in the activities
Procedure

Activity sequence idea 1:
Scale model of Sun/Earth/Moon
Visualise a complete rotation of the Moon around the Earth, through the seasons.
Seasons model demo
Phases of the Moon activity

Activity sequence idea 2:
Scale model of Sun/Earth/Moon
Look at a high resolution photo of the Moon to see the dark and light areas in it. e.g. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Full_Moon_%2815984763045%29.jpg
Reflection activity to show that the light areas of the Moon are reflecting the Sun's light, and the dark areas are not.

Activity sequence 3:
Leaves turn colours before they drop from trees in the Fall. What colours do we see?
One of these colours is in leaves all year but is hidden until the green disappears in the Fall.
We’ll use a technique to separate out the colours in leaves, so we can find the hidden colour.
Set up leaf colours.
Move to a dark area in the school (gym with no windows/basement/behind curtains on a stage).
Demonstrate why we get seasons.
Because the Earth is tilted, the amount of sunlight reaching Canada in the Northern hemisphere changes through the year. In the summer we are tilted towards the sun, in the winter we are tilted away. (The Southern hemisphere is the opposite, so has summer and winter at opposite times of year from us.)
Model why the Moon looks different at different times of the month with Phases of the Moon activity.
Leaf colours revisit and discussion.
Green leaves have green and yellow pigments in them.
In the summer leaves are green. They also contain yellow pigment but it is masked by the green.
In the fall, as the leaf starts to die in preparation for falling off, the green pigment breaks down and loses its colour. The yellow colour then becomes visible. So some fall leaves turn yellow. (The red colour of other Fall leaves are by a different mechanism.)

One way that animals adapt for the winter is making a new coat of thicker feathers or fur, to keep them warm in the colder months.
Some animals also change the colour of their fur/feather colours between summer and winter, so that they are better camouflaged in each season. Look at photos e.g. ptarmigan birds in summer and winter.

Indigenous groups, such as the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations, who’s land we are on, have a traditional ‘Seasonal Round’, to harvest food and make tools when each food/material becomes abundant in each season.
Optionally use this poster: https://vashonheritagemuseum.org/product/coast-salish-poster/

Notes

Other Effects to include in this lesson:
Animals adapting to winter - feather, fur activities (look up close for function?)
Hibernation/migration
Tides and effects on animals - see Moon lesson
Nocturnal/Diurnal animals?

Grades taught
Gr 1
Gr 2
Gr 3
Gr 4

Nitrogen cycle through salmon to trees

Summary
Follow the nitrogen as it breaks down from salmon flesh to ammonia (ammonification). Plants can absorb ammonia from soil.
Procedure

Salmon bring nitrogen from the ocean into the temperate rainforest of the Pacific Northwest.
This activity shows how using molecule models.

Spawning salmon swim upstream, into the forests of the Pacific Northwest.
They either die on the river banks after spawning, or are caught by animals and taken into the forest to be eaten. Carcasses are left behind by bears, coyotes, cougars, racoons, eagles, crows etc.

See what happens to the salmon's carcass as it decomposes on the forest floor:
Inside the salmon is muscle which is made of protein. (That's why fish is a good source of protein for us.)
Zoom into the muscle to the molecules that make it up:
https://www.mdpi.com/molecules/molecules-26-01559/article_deploy/html/i…
or https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/image/FS454/Dtxd3vzk72/Ijalvp6fin/Ijalvp6fin-…
(Molecules are tiny tiny particles that make up matter. Too small to see individually, but trillions of them together make up everything areound us.)
Lay out molecule model of protein in a salmon’s body.
The molecule is made up of atoms.
We will look at one atom, the nitrogen, and see how it moves through the food web.
Find the nitrogen atoms in this protein molecule - the blue atoms. (Blue is the international symbol for a nitrogen atom worldwide.)

The salmon protein first is broken down by bacteria in the soil, into its units.
Break the protein apart and give each student a piece. Ask students to combine their piece with water, as the soil bacteria do. (show image)
The nitrogen atoms are now part of single units of protein (amino acids).
The decomposition does not stop here.
The amino acid breaks apart to form ammonia (show image). Ask students to make a molecule of ammonia from their amino acid.
Ammonia is taken up by plant roots, and is a rich nutrient, allowing our Pacific Northwest trees to grow huge.
Plants get nitrogen from salmon! 3/4 of plant nitrogen in the temperate rainforest is from salmon!

Give students another oxygen so that they can make the other decomposition products, water and carbon dioxide (show image).
Make these molecules of decomposition these extra oxygens.

Then if time, free play molecule building.

Grades taught
Gr 2
Gr 3

Separating heterogeneous mixtures including Indigenous methods

Summary
Separate a mixture using different methods, then relate to Indigenous separation methods. Model a clam basket separating clams and sand. Learn how to twine, an Indigenous weaving method used to make clam baskets.
Procedure

Challenge students to separate a mixture of materials using various tools.
Name the methods they used, and give real life (including some industrial) examples, and Indigenous uses of separating materials for harvesting food.

Model a clam basket separating clams from sand.

Learn how to twine, an Indigenous weaving method for making clam baskets (and other woven tools and clothing).

Grades taught
Gr 6

Separating a heterogeneous mixture

Summary
Challenge students to separate the components of a heterogeneous mixture (marbles, gravel, sand, vermiculite) using a variety of tools (sieve, magnets, filter paper and water).
Materials

Per small student group:

  • small pot containing a mixture of materials:
  • 6 marbles
  • 2 Tbspns gravel
  • 2 Tbspns sand (e.g. sieved beach sand to remove shells and plants)
  • 2 Tbspns potting soil (sieved to remove plant materials), or vermiculite/styrofoam balls
  • tools to separate the materials:
  • tall tubs e.g yogurt tub
  • sieve
  • filter papers (not dollar store - need good quality)
  • 3 mini binder clips to secure filter paper over tub
  • magnets
  • bottle of water
  • large tray to work in and contain mess
  • little cups to put separated materials into
Procedure

Tell students they will separate a mixture of materials from the mixture in the pot. They will separate the marbles from the gravel from the sand from the magnetic sand from the soil/vermiculite, as best as they can, and add each separated material to its own little cup. Tell them that there are many routes to separating each of the materials out.
Show them how to use the sieve, and how to use the elastic band to secure the filter paper over the tall tub.
Students should work in a tray to contain any mess.

As students work, name the methods of separation and write up on the board as they occur:
handpicking (picking one material from a mix to separate it out)
sieving (using a sieve which catches larger materials while allowing smaller materials to pass through it)
filtration (using a filter to catch materials that are too large to pass through the filter, while allowing the liquid to flow through)
magnetic separation (using a magnet to pick up and separate out materials that are attracted to a magnet i.e. they contain iron)
sedimentation (adding materials to water to separate those that sink)
flotation (adding materials to water to separate those that float)

Circulate to encourage students to try different methods to separate out materials in their mix into different little cups.
Do not require the separation to be perfect, but that students try the different separation tools.

Once they have all separated as best they can, review the separation methods that have been written up on the board, and how students used them.
There are different paths to separating out the materials, but some, in retrospect, are more efficient (e.g. separating out the magnetic sand before it gets wet). For mass separation methods of the food industry, separating metals from rock, use the most efficient route.
Add in other local processes that use any of these methods:
cranberries are harvested in the Lower Mainland by floation e.g. Pacific Northwest Indigenous oolichan grease prepared by flotation
Pacific Northwest Indigenous clam baskets and the sustainable gill nets are sieving/filtration methods.
Water purification plants use sedimentation and flotation methods.
Metal extraction from iron ore uses large scale sieving, magnetic separation and flotation.

Other kinds of separation, maybe as a demonstration:
Separate seeds from a plant (faster than handpicking) by threshing (shake in bag), then winnowing (blow off lighter parts).
https://bcfarmsandfood.com/six-ways-to-screen-and-winnow-seeds/
Separate materials of different densities by swirling and shaking in a wide pan, called yandying by Indigenous Australian cultures, also how gold panning works.

Notes

Apply these (and/or other) separation methods to model an industrial separation process e.g. separating copper from calchopyrite.

Grades taught
Gr 6

Science as Active Inquiry

Summary
Grounded teaching philosophy behind the Play-Debrief-Replay teaching method, and many ideas of how to set up this instructional model in your classroom.
Type of resource
Book
Resource details

Science as Active Inquiry: A Teacher's Guide to the Development of Effective Science Teaching by Selma Wassermann and J.W. George Ivany. Rowman and Littlefield 2022

Notes

An awesome updated 3rd edition. Loads of ideas, as well as help and inspiration for teaching science by the play-debrief-play method.

A summary of the method, with my own small additions:

Stage 1: Play (Gathering Knowledge)
Set up enough stations so that students have enough space and materials to work without competing for space and materials. Tell the students how much time you will give them for a particular centre. Wassermann and Ivany suggest 10 to 15 minutes. Ideally, allow students to work as long as most of them are engaged - then they have time to test many ideas and explore more deeply.
While the students are manipulating, circulate with generally encouraging comments, but none that are directive or evaluative. You want the ideas of what further to research to come from your students. For many free experimentation activities, I like to add note-taking, so that students can refer to them later when they may have forgotten exactly what they tried.
Stage 2: Debrief (Promoting Understanding)
Call your students to a different space to debrief, bringing their notes with them.
This time should be a safe time for all students. All students should be able to share what they discovered without judgement. If some students disagree on a result, you help them engage in respectful debate, and discuss how to proceed (e.g. repeat the experiment to confirm results, try the experiment in a different way). Ask the students how they might test their ideas as to why something is working a certain way, and write the ideas on the board. At this point, I pair and group students with similar ideas/interests to work together for the Replay, and give them a question(s) to focus on.
Stage 3: Replay (Applying Knowledge)
Students go back to the materials, focusing on addressing the ideas that came up during Debriefing. Students may choose one of the ideas to test, or test several if they have time - this may need to be organized by the teacher. This is a time for students to do duplicate experiments, use controls, make sure of fair testing etc, to be as rigorous as they can - these methods should be familiar to the students or explained to them before and during their experimentation.
Stage 4 (optional): Final Debrief
At a final debrief, students report on what they found and the class concludes what they have learned so far. (There will be many questions still unanswered, which is real science!)

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