I am aware of another book for children on biomimicry:
Warning signs must be understood by all. Birds do not eat ladybugs since they are poisonous. They can be recognized by their color. In the same way, we designed the street lights conventions. In the Hopscotch program, the traffic light actually works with the 3 colors: red, green and yellow lights at intervals. Grade 4 students could research from their habitats inventions that could be derived and code their results.
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garo%C3%A9
Nature has been a constant source of inspiration for scientists from the design of the airplane to velcro. This has been named Biomimitism. The children’s book ‘Quand la nature inspire la science’ documents many of those inventions. One of the is the ‘arbre fontaine’ inspired by the Garoé tree. The net is placed high in mountains where there is only fog. The net allows to collect the water vapor and send the collected water droplets down the mountain.
Modeling this process and coding the results using Hopscoth would be a great experiment for grade 3.
Grade 3 students painted their art created at the Living art centre. We used acrylic paint from the Dollar Store. It dries very quickly.
http://education.scholastic.ca/category/PCSP
A lesson from the grade 3 scholastic science manual. Building a flower to understand the parts of a plant, and pollination. Parts discussed were the stem, petals, the pistil and the stamen with pollen. We discussed how the pollen needs to go from one flower to the pistil of another flower to create fruits like apples.
http://www.livresouverts.qc.ca/index.php?p=il&lo=46380&sec=2
This is an excellent book to show the effect of our actions on the environment. There are 15 interesting experiments. Today with my grade 3 class, we worked on the experiment to explain the effect of acid rain on plants.
The picture showing the effect of acid rain is breath taking. The trees are damaged, there are no cars or pollution around, yet we see the poor health of the trees. What is happening. We discussed the image and came up with some ideas.
We made acid rain. Mixed some vinegar with the water and planted seeds in two different containers. One container will be watered with tap water and the other with diluted vinegar. The seeds were placed in our greenhouse made of an old aquarium covered with plastic.
We also tested water purity.
Tap water – 168 ppm
diluted vinegar – 245 ppm
since we also went swimming, we tested pool water – 627 ppm
Students went to the lab and then research articles on the online Encyclopedia Universalis purchased by our board about acid rain. Using wordle (http://www.wordle.net/) students create a word cloud of the important words of the articles they read. The encyclopedia is nice since we can find articles about many subjects, read along with highlighted yellow texts and also with voice.
Back in the classroom, in their table groups, they wrote down a mind map showing their understanding of acid rain.
We will revisit the acid rain as we see what happens to our seeds.
Every year we have participated on Earth Day assembly. This year, this will be our song. We are planning to make a video with our recording of the song. The video will contain Hopscotch pictures of children’s work around what they can do to help our environment. With just a few minutes of discussion with my grade 3 class, we already came up with ideas: walk, ride a bicycle, grow our own food, recycle, take the train.
In order to take position on energy issues, we first of all need to understand them. The site INSIDE EDUCATION provides several good resources around what is happening with the oil sands in Alberta including teacher’s manuals and videos both in English and French.
Here’s a Hopscotch drawing of “in situ” technology to collect bitumen deep inside the Earth. They also discuss the environmental impact of the oil industry.
http://www.insideeducation.ca/
http://www.mastermindtoys.com/Planete-Terre-L2-Bo-Planet-Earth-Bo-Set.aspx
http://www.mastermindtoys.com/Lautobus-magique-12-Phonics-books-MSB.aspx
When I saw those books, I felt like being 6 years old again. Reading can be a struggle but if we have something fascinating to learn with, it makes reading quite pleasant. Books have been produced around the DVD series Planete Terre and the television program Magic School Bus. If I was teaching grade 1, I would probably try those books with my students.
http://fr.mongabay.com/news/2014/fr1127-hance-new-cat-brazil.html
The Ontario Science Center is a nice place to go to surround yourself with science. There are many exhibits but this one caught my attention. In the Living Earth section of the museum, there is a bulletin board with articles worth sharing. I found the link online both in English and French. DNA study reveals new wild cat species in Brazil. By analyzing biological samples, scientists were able to identify unknown species using DNA analysis.
The picture above was taken at night with an infrared camera.
The species are endangered and they discovered this new species in plain sight. The article concludes wisely by asking a question. How can we prevent a species from disappearing if we do not know they exist in the first place?
http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/frostinterview/2012/12/20121219111158970847.html
http://www.lactualite.com/opinions/le-blogue-de-valerie-borde/decouverte-le-blogue-de-valerie-borde/quelle-ethique-pour-la-biologie-synthetique/
Craig Ventor and his team created life artificially. The two links discuss his research and the ethics of synthetic biology. What are the implications of creating artificial life for our health, our environment? What do students think about tampering with the natural order?