Kindergarten teacher Deb Dunham’s class has picked out a tree to study during the FOSS trees kit.
“They seem to be loving it, especially keeping track of our tree,” she said.
Below are photos of the students drawing the tree in their science journals.
We’ve got little geologists on our hands, thanks to the new FOSS curriculum at Sunset Heights Elementary!
Katie Peterson’s 2nd Grade class explored rocks on Wednesday, September 4, 2013.
“We are currently studying different types of rocks,” she said. “Our focus question for the day was ‘What happens when rocks are placed in water?’ We did lots of observations, dictations, and drawings of dry rocks.”
Then Peterson’s class further studied the rocks after placing them in water.
“[We] took turns placing different rocks in water, observing what happened to both the rock and the water,” she said. “We took the rocks out and again observed, dictated and drew to show what we were seeing. Once dumping the ‘dirty’ water out into a basin, we talked about what was left over in the cups we were using and where that came from.”
One of the things students learned was that some rocks are dustier than others, which caused the water to turn colors when submerged.
“The different types of rocks looked different when wet (some turned darker, some showed more pattern once wet, some didn’t change the way they looked),” Peterson said. “When we compared how they felt dry to wet, we no longer felt that sand or dust on the rocks.”
With this rock exploration, students have already learned several vocabulary words, including geologist, earth minerals, texture, weathering, basalt, tuff and scoria.
The next section in their rock studying is rock sorting, in which students will be looking at various river rocks and talking about the vocabulary word “properties” and sorting rocks by property (texture, size, color and pattern).
Below are some photos from Peterson that show students working on their rock experiment.
Webster City Community Schools 