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Year 2000-2001
Katherine Brennan School
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Grade 5: Gwen Robinson
Ms. Robinson’s creativity was showcased in her unit, “Eggs-traordinary Creations, No Eggs-aggeration (An Adventure With A.H.Eggbert).” Her students were delighted with her original hand puppet, Almost Hatched Eggbert, the host for this study of egg biodiversity. Ms. Robinson’s students experienced “the processes of science: observing, describing, classifying, comparing, measuring, interpreting data, inferring, predicting, communicating, formulating questions, experimenting, and developing hypotheses.” Her unit also included an entire lesson continuing the playful word games in the title.
 “Oh, we had a good time on that one, ‘Interesting Eggs-planations’. It was so funny. I did the example for them, and I had an example of an "eggs-cited" egg. It was a happy egg… . They said, ‘We can’t do it.’ Then all of a sudden someone said, ‘Oh, I know, that’s in the dictionary!’… . I mean, we had 20-30-40 words…One girl did, "Eggs-ercise", and … she had an egg that was … a running egg… . The kids were excited! . They never saw so many ‘live’ dead things in their life that they could touch! …They liked using the microscope, they liked going through the drawers, and saying, ‘Is that real?’, ‘ can we touch it?’ Of course, you got a lot of, ‘Ewww!’ … but, they got real comfortable, real quick… . It got real interesting… . Everything they could find, even outside, they wanted to look at it under the microscope, they wanted to see what it looks like… . I’ve had minimal experience with science….so this was…the top of the line … . It was unreal, it was amazing. I can’t get them to do the work in the regular setting, as well as it worked out in there… . I liked the idea that the kids wanted to explore. They kept making a lot of comparisons. … seeing the specimens, and then looking in a book. They liked making those comparisons. … I don’t know if I put books [in my unit] as much as they were using them… . For them to pair up was written there…but the next time they paired up, it was like a peer teaching thing, as opposed to them both learning it at the same time… . I thought that was excellent. I never believed it would happen like that. I have to start a whole new method of teaching!”
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Grade 5: Leslie DePriest
Ms. DePriest purposely wrote her unit as an introduction to a topic, as stated in the title, “Designs for Life: An Introduction to Adaptations.” “This unit was designed to be a means by which students will be coaxed into changing the way they think about the world around them… . This entire unit is an introduction, in a sense, in that the ten lessons in this unit give students a glimpse at a few adaptations of a few organisms. Through the use of many hands-on activities and the BioAction Lab, it is my hope that the children will understand the interrelationships of form and function within the natural world.”
“It was a good experience… . I don’t think it compares to the way we normally teach sciences…. . One thing it’s made me see, is, science used to be overwhelming to me, just because I didn’t feel I had the concrete knowledge… . I’ve seen that science is easy to teach in an interesting way. Before, I really thought, ‘You know, I really don’t know what to do.’ I don’t have a big science background so I just kind of stayed away from it. Science is everywhere. You can take something as simple as going outside and looking at leaves, and you can build a science lesson around that. So that’s definitely going to change the way I teach. … But now I know that I can make it interesting to me, even with my kids at home, I saw different things I could do with my son. He’s five… . Just by the experience of doing it there, by the fourth or fifth lesson they felt comfortable...being able to use the resources later on in the unit, not having to ask, ‘How do I find it?’ They could get the book on their own and find things. They used the Internet for a lesson on butterflies… . I was going to tell them the metamorphosis stages, but I said, we should see if they can find it on their own. So I gave them 20 minutes - and they were able to tell me the stages, the names of the stages. … Well, you can’t go back, after an experience like that. I’ve learned that I can do this. I can use the Lab, it’s nice, but I can create stuff. I can do it.”
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