Fake Cats and Fair Experiments

Picture from Bird Sleuth Resource Pages. Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Today we looked at an experiment that was done by a middle school student in Oregon. It is on pages 8 & 9 in the Resource Pages from Bird Sleuth. She took a stuffed cat and placed it next to her bird feeder to see if it would scare the birds and keep them from visiting the feeder. We used her investigation to see if it was designed in a way that was fair and was actually testing her hypothesis. This will hopefully help us set up our experiments and investigations in a way that will get us closer to answering our own questions about birds. Everyone should be ready to start their investigations by Monday, October 31st at the latest. If they can start sooner, that is even better. They should run their experiments and systematic observations for at least 5 days in order to gather some good data. If they are looking at data from some of the online resources this will give them enough time to sort through what is out there figure out what they need to look at more closely.

Hypotheses and Variables

We have been working on our bird projects this week. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday we will have the laptop lab and will work on updating our wiki pages and giving our research teams feedback on their projects. Monday we went over how to form hypotheses along with our guiding questions about birds. We looked at how the hypothesis needs to be based on a reasonable and educated guess about what we think might be happening. How we set up our investigations are very important so that we can collect data that will either support or reject our hypotheses. We used resources from the BirdSleuth curriculum from the Cornell Ornithology Lab. Here is a Googledoc link to the Resource Pages. We used page 5 "Hypothesis Help."
Tuesday we used the information on pages 6 and 7 of the Resource Pages to help us understand the differences between Independent Variables, Dependent Variables and Control Variables when setting up an experiment. And how to show our results graphically. We used the graphs on the front pages of the Resource Pages and the Investigator's Journal for practice. Each student got a copy of the Investigator's Journal and handouts of the Variables page. On Page 4 of the Investigator's Journal we practiced identifying Independent and Dependent variables and how we might measure them.
They will need their final question, hypothesis and methods and materials figured out by this Friday, October 28th. All this will need to be posted on their wiki page.
We went over the checklist and timeline for the project as well. The final project will be finished by November 15th and shared in an oral presentation on November 17th.

Wiki Wiki Word

Today we got onto the class bird project wikispace and most every student created their individual pages. Check out the page: cfsbirds-2011.wikispaces.com/ The computers were slow, but we eventually all got logged in, joined the wiki and created a page. Most students began posting their preliminary questions as well. These questions will guide our bird studies. The wiki has a resource page that has lots of good sites for finding data on bird migration times, distributions, and maps of seasonal movements. There are also links to pages about individual species of birds and how to make simple bird feeders. We will break up into study/review teams soon to help us develop our projects as we work on these over the next 4 weeks.

M&Ms and Graphing

Monday and Tuesday we spent some time reviewing how to use Excel to enter data and make graphs. Each student got a "fun pack" of M&Ms. After predicting which color would be the most prevalent, they counted up the totals, made tables and created three different graphs. They had to make a pie chart, a bar graph and a graph of their choice. Here is the handout: Candy Graphing. Hopefully this will refresh their memories on how to use Excel and how to choose appropriate graphs for showing different sets of data. We are getting ready to start our bird studies and graphing is going to be an important part of their projects.
Last Thursday we wrote up our stream study reports. Overall that section of New Hope Creek was pretty healthy.

New Hope Creek Field Trip

Today 1st and 3rd periods went to the Johnston Mill site on New Hope Creek. We tested the water for temperature, pH, Nitrates, Nitrites, and Phosphates. We flipped over rocks and collected stream invertebrates to identify and to help us determine the quality of the water. We also collected minnows, crayfish, and frogs. The weather was a little cool and the water levels were low, but we were able to find quite a few creatures. Tomorrow 2nd period will be going and doing the same thing.

Review Quiz and prep for Field Trip

Today we had a review quiz on some of the things that we have been studying. Here is a copy of the quiz. Eco Quiz #2. We tried to answer all the questions on our own without looking at our notes. Then we shared what we had with our table mates and after a discussion made revisions. Then we went over it as as group and fixed it as needed. Tomorrow and Wednesday we have block schedule and will be going on a field trip to New Hope Creek to study the health of the stream and to see what sorts of creatures live there. Dress warmly and wear shoes. No sandals or flip flops.

Rotting Log Investigations

Log Poking Technique

Mushroom

Beetle grub and mycilia

Thursday we went out into the woods behind school and poked around the rotting logs. Bug spray was provided to those who wanted it and only one tick was spotted. We looked for decomposers and used a field guide to identify the creatures that we found. We found termites, fungi, ants, spiders, centipedes, millipedes, crickets, wood roaches, slugs, snails, grubs and many other types of soil decomposers and the creatures that prey upon them. Here is the field guide that we used: Soil Decomposers.

Milipede

Egg in a basket fungi