2014-2015 GK-12 Fellows and Partner-Teachers leading sessions at the Summer Institute.
The KBS K-12 partnership cordially invites you to the 2014 Summer Institute! Mark your calendars for this three day event, from Monday June 23 through Wednesday June 25. The schedule will run from 8 AM to 4 PM each day.
Below you’ll find our daily agendas well as details on our plenary sessions and concurrent sessions. Events will continue to update as we develop content. Please rsvp to Sarah at bodbyl@msu.edu if you plan to attend. We look forward to seeing you!
***Please note: This year we will be capping a $75/day stipend for teacher attendees to the first 60 with an rsvp.***
Agenda Drafts (click to view):
Concurrent Session Abstracts:
In this session, elementary and middle school teachers will learn about how to use a suite of astronomy lessons and activities to meet earth and space science standards. We will create and analyze impact craters in order to understand the formation of the planets and their moons. We will practice classifying objects floating around in our solar system (spoiler: there may be more than you think)! Teachers will tie these ideas into an evaluation tool looking at eight essential questions that should be answered about how science is taught. If time allows, teachers will be able to select a new lesson to evaluate using the NGSS tool structure. AND, there will be a free DVD with massive amounts of lessons and activities for each teacher, and DOOR PRIZES, both courtesy of the Galileo Educator’s Network!
How do we help our students 1) “read” websites, news stories, and other information they encounter in the media about socio-scientific issues, and 2) grapple with the information the find to make informed decisions? In this session we want to discuss the first part of this question. We will use a scientific “hoax” website to brainstorm about questions we would want our middle and high school students to ask when searching for information on the internet. Finally, we will discuss how to support our students in understanding a specific contemporary controversial issue: fracking. Our goal is to think about how to help our students use “slow thinking” as a strategy for media literacy in the context of socio-scientific issues.
Plants uptake different mineral elements to grow and develop. Various symptoms, such as yellowing leaves and rotten sprouts, will occur when plants lack necessary nutrition. It is difficult, however, to observe those symptoms in soil because fertilizers usually have been applied. With the help of hydroponics techniques, people will have chances to better understand the functions of mineral elements and watch the specific deficiency symptoms when a particular essential element is absent.In this session of the summer institute, a brief introduction about plant nutrition will be given. Participants will also have opportunities to practice hydroponics. In addition, every participant is cordially invited to adopt a plant to observe deficiency symptoms and record plants growth information. Before the end of the session, we will have a field tour to study how fertilizer and nitrogen affect crops.
Species interactions occur in all systems in nature, and we can observe many interactions in our own backyards. In this session, students will observe and identify species interactions, name and describe the different types of interactions, and make predictions about the outcomes of multiple species interactions. The session includes outdoor observations, games, and graphing activities.
Come join us on an adventure following animals as they move through various habitats. Create a grid map from an actual satellite photo and corresponding habitat map. Use your grid to develop the best path for your animal’s movement. Treats will be provided to those who survive the journey! 🙂
200 million years ago the humble Appalachian mountains looked more like the Himalayas. How did that happen and where did all that limestone rock (and inorganic carbon) go? Limestone is inorganic carbon rock that buffers acidic tummies and similarly provides alkalinity to soils and rivers. We will go beyond the textbook and talk about how the water and carbon cycles influence each other, why limestone rock is such a big deal in Michigan, and we’ll dig into the acid base chemistry to figure out where the carbon goes. We’ll study this in the context of agricultural liming, which is the same chemical process as the weathering of mountains. The main activity involves graphing and analyzing data from a scientific journal article looking at inorganic carbon in the Mississippi River. We’ll look at how the amount of inorganic carbon at the mouth of the Mississippi River has changed over time and how changes in agriculture in the river basin over that time is driving these patterns.
Soil properties can often dictate the types of plants that can live in a particular habitat. The composition of soil affects everything from the amount of water available, to the types of nutrients and minerals present, to a plant’s root structure and growth. This lesson will focus its investigation on the particle sizes of various soil types. All soils are made up of different combinations of sand, silt, and clay; and each has very different sized particles. The relative amounts of each of these components in a soil will affect how quickly water flows through it. During this lesson, participants will look at sand, silt, and clay particles under a microscope and use this information to estimate the proportion of these components within various soil samples they have collected. They will also test the permeability of their soil and relate this to its makeup and particle size. Finally, plant adaptations to live in various soil types will be discussed, and a case study will incorporate data interpretation from a plant species that is specialized to live on a unique soil type. This lesson not only addresses both Earth Science and Natural Science curricula, but it also incorporates inquiry based learning, microscope work, and data interpretation.
In this lesson, students will practice classification basics by using observations of structural differences among seeds as a basis for organizing them into logical groups. Students will use inquiry to discover characteristics that help seeds to disperse in a variety of ways, and propose explanations as to why it would need to do so. Finally, students will demonstrate and display what they have learned by applying it to an engineering task.
A lesson that teaches the importance of understanding how the entire food web can shape whether we find species in an ecosystem or not. We will discuss both the life requirements and controlling factors (abiotic + biotic) that determine where different species such as mosquitoes and frogs can live. Using an existing experiment at the KBS pond lab, we will generate hypotheses about what we expect different food webs to look like and whether or not they will support mosquito larvae. The biodiversity and water chemistry of our different experimental ponds (varied nutrient levels and initial communities) will be assessed to generate food webs and test our hypotheses.
Decomposition is a fundamental ecological process happening all around us involving the cycling of matter and energy. Together we will explore what factors matter in decomposition, explain these factors from our own experience, hands on demonstrations and data from long term experiments. Finally we will use this exploration to ask our own questions about what happens during decomposition and how to measure it.
Press disturbance leading to many changes in global and local climates is an inevitable consequence of changing CO2concentrations. Students of all ages can participate in observing and monitoring these changes. Project BudBurst (http://www.budburst.org/) is a national network of people monitoring plants as the seasons change who have developed resources for teachers and students. Students as young as Kindergarten can collect data on what day the leaves on a plant in their schoolyard (or BEST plots!) first started to changed color, when most of it’s flowers have fallen off, or other plant life cycle milestones. They can then contribute this information to a national database that is freely available for use by scientists and educators. Older students can use the project’s free, easy to use, web-based mapping and data visualization tools (http://www.budburst.org/
Email Sarah Bodbyl (bodbyl@msu.edu) if you would like to be added to this list.
Comstock/STEM: Mark Shenefield, Jan Kiino (M.), Emmy Kimmer, Shirley Gilland, Laurie Anderson, Mary Grintals (afternoons), Kim Sandefur, Caleb Fisher
Delton-Kellogg: Lisa Kellam (T,W), Julie Renauldo
Galesburg-Augusta:
Gobles: Becky Drayton
Gull Lake: Kim Clancy, Ashley Carroll, Jennifer Boyle, Matt Hawkins, Blair Rogers, Kari Freling
Harper Creek: Amy Smith, Meredith Hawkins, Sandy Erwin, Emily Subers (W)
Hastings: Marty Buehler, Jill Withey
Kalamazoo Area Math Science Center: Cheryl Hach
Lawton: Marcia Angle, Dave Williams (T,W)
Martin: Rob Robrahn
Olivet: Marie Toburen, Russ Stolberg
Parchment: Jodie Lugar-McManus
Plainwell: Marty Green, Lisa Wininger (M,T), Heather Damick (M,T)
Thornapple-Kellogg: Beth Bauer, Jamie Bowman, Shaun Davis
Vicksburg: Lisa Harbour, Katherine Kay, Liz Ratashak, Dave Nette
Amy Smith (M,T) – location TBA
Katie McKinley (T)- unassociated
KBS & Staff: Tom Getty, Andy Anderson, Jennifer Doherty, Sarah Bodbyl, Dani Fegan, Emily Dittmar, Susan Magnoli, Bonnie McGill, Andy Booms, Brendan O’Neill, Pat Hanly, Di Liang
WMU Evaluation Staff: Bob Ruhf + 1