Lesson 1-5
Learning Targets
- I can identify scientific questions that we can investigate at school
- I can organize our questions into categories
Materials
- Science and engineering notebook (SEN)
- Previous Lesson 1-1 Ideas About Pictures of Garbage or notes in SEN
- Previous Lesson 1-2: Notes on the Landfill Video or notes in SEN
- Previous Lesson 1-3: Thinking About the Garbage Handling System or notes in SEN
- Previous Lesson 1-4: Article: Pacific Ocean “Garbage Patches”
- Sticky notes
- Driving Question board
Lesson Instructions
Select each section below for full instructions. When you see the following symbols within the instructions, select them for additional information:
Guidance on how to support newcomer students
Link to the SISL Video Library to see relevant practices in action
Review Ideas and Questions from Previous Lessons
During this final lesson of the Cluster 1, students will review the ideas and questions they have collected in their SENs during the first four lessons and share their questions in triads and with the class. They will categorize their questions and articulate an overarching question about garbage they will investigate for the remainder of the unit.
SISL Practices in Action
In this video from the SISL Video Library, you can see how the SISL curriculum guides students in developing generating, sharing, and categorizing their questions about scientific phenomena. You can see how a teacher guides her class, which includes students with a range of English proficiencies, through the process.
Tell the class: “You have been gathering lots of really interesting ideas and questions about garbage in your notebooks. Look over the ideas and questions you have written in your notebook. Write the questions that are most interesting to you on sticky notes.”
“You also might have new questions from the text we read about garbage patches in the ocean. Write those on sticky notes too. Write each question on its own sticky note.”
Allow time for students to read over their questions and ideas and write their questions on sticky notes. Circulate around the room and provide affirmations for the great ideas and questions they have. At this point, don’t worry about the grammatical form of their questions—as they share with their groups and the class, ideas can be formulated more clearly into question form.
Supporting Your Newcomer Students
When students are writing all of their questions on post-it notes, emphasize ideas rather than form. Encourage newcomers to write what they can in English and to use their home language as needed to express their ideas.
Identify Questions that can be Investigated in School
Inform the class that next we will plan and carry out investigations to help us answer some of these questions.
“Which of your questions do you think we could investigate further in the classroom? Can you refine or simplify any of your questions so that we could investigate them directly?”
Provide an example and a non-example:
- For example, you might have a really interesting question like, “Can we send garbage into the Sun to get rid of it?”
“That’s a good question but we can’t investigate it, because in school we have no way of moving garbage to the Sun.” - Another question you might have is, “What happens to bananas in the landfill system?”
“That’s a question we can investigate because we can bring bananas into the classroom and make observations of what happens to bananas over time.”
Tell students: “All questions are valid, but some can be answered by investigations. In school we can only carry out limited investigations. Some questions can’t be investigated at school because we don’t have the tools, time, space, resources or money to investigate them in school.”
Direct the students to look at their sticky note questions individually and put a star next to the questions that they can investigate in the classroom or could change to become a question that could be investigated in the classroom. Use a question or idea from a student as an example to model the task.
Supporting Your Newcomer Students
When students are starring questions that can be investigated in school, check in to make sure your newcomers understand the directions since students are working individually at this point.
After students have finished starring their questions that can be investigated, direct them to work in their triads to:
- Share the starred questions they think could be investigated with the group.
- Agree on which questions they can investigate further.
- Be ready to share these questions with the class.
Circulate amongst the groups as they discuss. After the triads, they will be sharing and organizing their questions as a class. Ideally, each student should share at least one question in this whole class discussion. As you circulate during triad discussions, check in with students who might be reticent to share in the whole class to make sure they have at least one question to share. Affirm the value of their questions and explain that you will be asking them to share it.
Supporting Your Newcomer Students
Circulate to make sure your newcomer students are engaged in their triad’s work and have questions to share. You can direct their groupmates to model how to say the newcomers’ questions in English so that newcomers feel comfortable expressing their questions to the whole-class. For recent newcomers, you can also have them share their questions in their home language and you or a peer can translate for the class.
Create Driving Question (DQ) Board for the Unit
Bring the class together and ask: “What questions do you have about garbage? Let’s start with the investigate-able questions you starred.”
Use the following procedure to populate the Driving Question (DQ) board:
- Elicit a question from a student and have them place their sticky note with that question on the board. If students have ideas they want to share and they aren’t in question form, that is ok as well. Encourage students to share what they have and support them to rephrase their ideas as questions.
- Ask students to raise their hands if they have similar questions. Encourage reticent students to participate by showing that you value their ideas and contributions to the class. For example: ” _______ had a really interesting question related to that idea. _____, could you share your question?” Each student with a similar question reads their question and describes how the new question connects to one already on the board. Those questions are also added to the DQ board. As one example: “What’s under that garbage pile?” and “What is that liquid stuff?” are connected because they relate to the materials found in garbage. If students aren’t able to make the connections, make them for them. This is important modeling for students. These connected questions form a category. Some example categories could be: “questions about garbage and the environment”; “garbage materials and what will happen to them”; or “the landfill and garbage disposal system”.
- Continue eliciting questions from students. When a question in a new category is offered, put it in a separate part of the board. Then ask students if anyone else has a question that is similar. Students add their sticky note next to the connected question.
- For a student who poses a new question but does not find a link to another question, do not immediately state how the question links to one or more questions already on the board. Instead, ask the class to help suggest a connection to another question already on the board.
Once all investigable questions are on the board, ask the class: “Is there one big question that connects all the questions?”
Review several questions to summarize that the questions are primarily about the garbage and what happens to the garbage. Guide students to the big question of the unit: “How does garbage impact our environment?”
Tell the class: “We will call this big question the Driving Question. It’s the question that all the other questions connect to. And we call this board with all of your questions the Driving Question board.”
Add the driving question to the top of the Driving Question board: “How does garbage impact the environment?”
“Finding the answer to the Driving Question is going to require finding the answers to all of our questions. Because all the questions are linked in some way, starting our investigation with any question helps us find the answer to other questions. We will keep coming back to the Driving Question Board. We can even add new questions to the board as we investigate ‘How does garbage impact the environment?’”