The Birds and the Bee (and the Body and Other Stuff)

It was a full week, as usual, with Mr. Bill's crew! We delved into birds and the Spelling Bee, as well as a lot of other cool stuff.

Birds: We kicked off our primary service learning work for the year--"Colorado Bluebird Project," a project we do in cooperation with the town of Castle Rock POST program.  Each spring, we monitor boxes designed especially for bluebird habitation. This helps scientists analyze population, reproduction, predation, and other patterns that affect the ecosystem as a whole. Although it is still several weeks before birds return to the area and start using the boxes, we have begun building our understanding of the role the birds play in our complex, interdependent environment.

The Spelling Bee: Two of our crew members competed in the annual REMS spelling bee. They both did wonderfully--finishing second and third out of sixteen spellers. Way to go, Brianna and Reid! Our congratulations also go the overall winner, Paradisio Dante.

(As a side note, the pronouncer for this year's contest was another Mr. Bill--Mr. Bill, Senior. Whatever skill Mr. Bill the Younger (though not quite so young anymore) has with the English language he can attribute to mentoring from Mr. Bill the Elder). 

The Body: We continued our expedition, "Survival Systems" by breaking into pairs to research one of six human body systems: respiratory, skeletal/muscular, endocrine, nervous, digestive, and circulatory.  As students use multiple resources to learn about these, they focus on their system's components; purposes; integration with other systems; and the things that harm and help the system's proper functioning. After they have concluded their research, they will present their findings to the rest of the crew.

Frac-Tac-Toe: Computations using fractions are difficult for many fifth graders to master and so it's one topic we continue to explore in math, using a variety of games and problem-solving situations.  A game introduced this week was "Frac-Tac-Toe," which made connections between fractions, decimals, and percents.  

What Are the Odds?: Another important mathematical subject fifth graders need to develop deeper understanding of is probability. This week we spent time learning that as the size of a sample increases, it more accurately reflects quantities within a population (e.g., every student pulling a sample of colored blocks from a bag will more precisely predict how many of each color is actually in a bag than if only a few students pulled a sample).  We also thought about probability by playing cards. Astute students soon begin to grasp how the probability of a certain card coming up impacts strategy. (Don't worry, moms and dads, no poker or Texas hold'em was played...that I know of.)

Voyage: We have begun looking forward to our winter voyage (Feb 25-27).  As part of this, Mr. Cody, our adventure ed coordinator, came in and worked with the crew for about an hour on team-building strategies and mental preparedness for the challenges they will face at Keystone Science School.

It's Systematic, My Dear Watson

As we got back into the swing of things this week, one of the concepts that drove our learning was that of systems. We pondered the word and searched our memory banks to see what we already knew about the topic. Students came up with ideas such as "an order of stuff"  and "a list of steps that makes a job go smoothly" and "a branch of things like on a tree." 

After that, we started discussing words that come up in a dictionary definition of the term, such as "interdependent," "multiple components," and "accomplish a purpose." We then began exploring how systems can be natural or man-made, and finally we zeroed in on the idea that plants and animals are actually systems...an individual organism is a system and it fits within larger systems such as an ecosystem.    

This was all to kick off of our new expedition about the systems that comprise plants and animals and enable them to live. 

One way we began investigating life systems was to look at the basic building block of both plants and animals--the cell. 

Here students are using microscopes to examine human cheek cells and onion cells:

Here students participate in a really fun way to demonstrate that each part of a system depends on the other parts. When the parts are working, it can accomplish its purpose, but when even one part malfunctions there is an impact on the whole system:

Another way students were exposed to systems was in math, where we systematically gathered information to investigate a question about data landmarks and probability. Had we not ordered the process of our investigation we couldn't have drawn reliable conclusions. We are playing many, many rounds of a card game called "First to Finish" in order to discover whether or not it is a fair game and why:

Taking measurements of ourselves was another way we systematically gathered data and used it for practice with metrics such as mean, median, mode, and range:

Finally, one could say society is a system and it only works if its primary components--people--work together in a cooperative way. To that aim, the older REMS crews took great delight in a presentation called "Choose Your Life" that drove home serious points about bullying in a fun way: