It Costs What?

Today we went over the reading, "It Costs What?" and outlined the different parts of the world involved in the making of the shirt and the resources used and pollution created. We filled out this chart to help us map everything: "It Cost What-Chart". We talked about the reasons that a shirt is still so cheap after traveling so far. This leads into a short project that looks at resources and pollution. Tomorrow is our last class before the Thanksgiving break.

Bird Project Presentations Wrapped Up

Thursday and Friday we finished presenting our Bird Study Projects. Most of them went really well. Some of them were frustrated by the weather and by squirrels. Everyone was able to come up with something that they could work with. A few projects are still working on some challenges with formatting their wiki pages.
We started reading a short story about a t-shirt and its origins as raw materials. "It Costs What?" The rest of the reading is for homework, due on Monday, November 21st.

Peer Review

Monday and Tuesday we are doing peer reviews of each other's work. We are using the forms in the Investigator's Journal on pages 20 and 21 to guide us in giving constructive feedback to our rough drafts. Each person will give feedback to at least 2 people in their study group. And they will get feedback from the other folks in their study group. This gets everyone to look critically at other projects and to get ideas for how to improve their own project. We will spend these two days polishing our wikipages and preparing for our presentations on Thursday, November 17th.

Coming towards the end

We are getting close to finishing our bird investigations. Everyone is wrapping up their research, compiling data, making charts and graphs and formating their wikipages. By the beginning of next week everyone should have their reports just about finished. The rough drafts are due that Monday, November 14. They will then give feedback to their study/research teams and make the final improvements. Presentations will start on Thursday, November 17th. Tuesday we looked at four different types of graphs, from the Resource Page handouts, pp. 16-21. We looked at Pie charts, Bar graphs, Line graphs and Scatter plots and when to use each type.

Data Collection Week

This week we have a limited number of classes due to the block week schedule and the 4th year trip to see the documentary film on Thursday. So we only meet 3 times this week. Everyone should be set up to collect their data this week and come in on Monday, November 7th with all of their data collected so that they can start analyzing it and making graphs and charts to show their results.

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.