My class has been hosting a Science Fair every year for the past dozen or so years.  I can't say that I always knew why I continued to make time for it, but it always seemed valuable and worthwhile, so I kept it going.

Today, I see why I continued the tradition.  It wasn't just because I did one as a child and enjoyed it.  It wasn't just because I saw my students explain a scientific discovery in a confident manner.  I continued this tradition because it is inquiry at its finest!  Students wonder about something and explore it!  

In our class, students are regularly given time to explore interests of their own, not specifically focused on science topics.  We call this: Passion Time.  Passion Time is an opportunity for students to spend a portion of their class time learning about topics of interest to them.  They may research their topic, conduct an experiment, or build something!  They may integrate the arts, video games, or music into their passion projects as well!

When children spend time exploring topics of interest to them during school, they become much more invested in the learning process.  A Science Fair offers students the same benefit, but it focuses their investment on the sciences!

In the image on the left, the Inquiry Process is explained (link).  Our Science Fair follows a similar process.  Students look through Science Fair topic guides looking for something that sparks their interest. When they find something, I work one-on-one with each student to fine-tune their Guiding Question.  Since students are completely in charge of coming up with their area of interest, they are immediately engaged in the process and motivated to learn more!

This allows me to oversee the entire process, provide feedback throughout, and discover what each student is truly capable of doing on his or her own.  Conducting the experiment together can be one of the best ways to bond with your students!  Take a glance at the video to the right showing Keegan, some of his friends, and me breaking four types of wood with a weight being dropped from increasing heights!  What a fun time!

They truly learn that you can't find out if something is an effective change if you have more than one variable changing at a time!  This is an important concept in the Scientific Method.

In the image on the left, the Scientific Method is described.  I like this image because it includes opportunities to be reflective and adaptable throughout the process.  Although students write a formal procedure prior to experimenting, it's important that they stay flexible and make changes if needed so the experiment works properly.  No one should be forced to keep a procedure that isn't working!

This graphic also encourages students to continue their curiosity after the Science Fair is over by asking a new question, forming a new hypothesis, and trying the experiment again on their own!  This encourages persistence and grit, as students work towards finding the true answers to their questions!

After the experimenting phase, we begin to work together as a class again to complete the rest of the project where we begin to analyze the data and prepare it for others to see.  

We create graphs and our final poster board.  Graphs help other students see the subtle differences in each of the variables.  It quantifies the students data and takes some of the subjectivity out of the data.

Students also work on an oral presentation that draws people in who are walking by during the Science Fair and gets them to want to learn more about their project!  Students are encouraged to have a hook at the beginning that gets people walking by to want to learn more about their project.  Of course, some projects are interesting even without a hook.  Watch a sample video of Brian teaching us about his Science Fair Project.

Teaching in a "21st Century Classroom" where everything is collaborative, technology is used for more than half of our day, and there are very few formal assessments can be tough for parents and administrators to completely understand at first.  When their child comes home from school each day and talks about playing Minecraft for an hour and...

...Skyping with a class from Sao Paolo, Brazil, some might wonder what it is these kids are being taught these days!  I want my parents and administrators to rest-assured that my students will not only be prepared for a vastly different world than we adults were prepared for, but they'll also be prepared for a typical middle school environment with worksheets, packets, textbooks, and tests.

So the way I decided to prepare my students for middle school was by finding a textbook that I actually liked that was written at an appropriate reading level for my students and had rigorous content where students would benefit from teacher-led instruction.

I created worksheet questions that I felt promoted whole class or small group discussions, prompted deep thinking and role-playing, and utilized my students' literal comprehension skills as well as inferential comprehension skills.

I wrote tests that didn't just rely on recall, but on a deep understanding of the important concepts from each chapter.  Although some questions needed to be multiple choice and True/False (to prepare them for these in the future), the best questions I created are short answer and essay (Yes, I teach 5th graders, so I have varied expectations for each student.  An Answer Key alone could not be used to grade these tests!).  

The topic of this curriculum is "U.S. Constitution and Government."  I've selected more rigorous objectives and Big Ideas than our district requires because with increased teacher support should come a higher level of understanding.  You can find our objectives here, along with some of the activities we will be doing in addition to the textbook.

To get my students started, we had a whole-class discussion about what they think we needed to have in our government and what we didn't want to have.  I suggested that they look at the U.S. Constitution's Preamble to see if there was anything in there that we wanted in our own government.  It turns out, we liked a lot of it!

I then handed out several other preambles to other country's constitutions (as well as the United Nations) and asked them to extract phrases out of those that we wanted as well.  They could only use sections that they completely understood and could defend though.

We then created a Google Spreadsheet that I gave everyone access to, and projected it on the board.  After teaching them about the stresses that come with editing the same document as 25 others, I let them add their direct quotes to the spreadsheet.  We now had a long list of phrases that represented beliefs that we had about our government on Mars.

I had everyone try to eliminate overlapping ideas on the spreadsheet, copy the remaining ideas over to a new shared Google Doc, and revise it so that it looked like a coherent paragraph (and then edit any mistakes).  Believe it or not, our final product was pretty good!

So now that we had our beliefs expressed in our Preamble, it was time to explain how our government would work.  So we decided to write the rest of our constitution!  I pointed out that what we were doing is following a format similar to the U.S. Constitution and my students were pretty amazed!

I helped organize the students at first, asking some questions that would get them all on the same page.  Then, based on what they said, I suggested that they divide and conquer to get things accomplished.  Last year, students wanted to base their Mars government on the U.S. Constitution rather than "go rogue!"  I got them to the point where they suggested that they divide up into three groups like the three articles in our Constitution that explains the responsibilities of the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches, respectively, and they did!

We used the same Google Doc from our Preamble activity, and each group started on a different page of the GDoc and typed how they thought their branch of the government should operate.  Whenever their branch overlapped with another branch, they sent liaisons to the other group to discuss how they should proceed (some amazing collaboration here!).  Throughout the whole process, I lurked on the GDoc and re-directed them whenever I thought they were getting off-track or going down a dead-end path.  I made suggestions for collaborating with other groups and helped them with their wording when they needed it.

First of all, we call them "Stations" in our classroom. That at least takes some of the "primary" off them!

Stations are an important part of our class for about half the year.  They help me to differentiate instruction for my students, provide enrichment opportunities, allow my students to follow their interests, and most importantly to me: they free up some time to give feedback to my kids on their work!  I often like to schedule as many "pullouts" during this time period as well, since speech, ELL, social work, etc. can all be considered a "station" to a child.  They handle being pulled out so much better when they think of it as a station!

We start "Stations" approximately one third to one half of the way through the school year.  This is when I feel I know my students well enough to create an individualized learning plan for each of my kids without wasting their time.  I have already tried to help them fix certain problems like using periods and capitals, or writing a timed prompt in 15 minutes.  If a student still doesn't show mastery (or close to it) by now, I feel comfortable using some "Stations" time to practice that skill.  It would be silly to do so at the beginning of the year, because so many students improve with just a few reminders or tips.

The rest of this blog post may make more sense after you watch the video at the top of this post.  It shows what the first day of stations looked like in our room.

To introduce Stations, I don't spend much time doing so.  I simply tell my students where they can find their schedules for the week (see image at left), show them how to find the directions for each station (seen in the video below), and point to each station in the classroom.  If they need anything from me, it is printed on their schedule to get it from me.  Otherwise, they are not allowed to ask me any questions during a rotation (but they can between rotations).  This is to prevent those constant interruptions while I'm working with a child or a small group.  It also encourages collaboration and problem-solving...

Well, quite a few!  I have the traditional stations based on subjects (e.g. math, science/social studies, writing, etc.), and I have some newer ideas that work best in an intermediate setting.  Those include a Games Station where students have several educational games to choose between.  They have to read the directions themselves (there are always 2-4 students assigned to a station at a time so they can figure it out collaboratively).  You can read about all of my stations in more detail at the end of this post.

One of my students' favorite stations is actually a packet!  The station is called CTAC, and it stands for Choice Time Activity Center.  This is the name of the place that their CTAC packets are kept.  These packets are often enrichment-based and work directly to increase my students' critical thinking or creative thinking skills.  Some packets are extra practice for skills that a student hasn't mastered yet (they don't really care for those!!!).