Typically on Mondays, science in Hillsborough County consists of a design challenge. Students are presented with a problem, brainstorm and idea, design a blue print, then test it.
This time, I came up with my own design challenge based off of a real problem that we were having!
A few weeks ago, we planted lettuce seeds in cups. Each weekend, a storm would cup, filling the cups to the top with water and drowning our seeds. Our lettuce seeds did not grow successfully.
Why is that?! Why would the water remain in our cups and drown our plants weekend after weekend? I realized it was because there was no drainage for our cups-- but my kinders did not realize that. That is where I created this design challenge for them.
Earlier that day, I was in our garden with two of our students and one made the observation about the cups. I started by having him share his observation, showing this picture to the entire class, then we discussed why this was a problem (our plants would drown). I asked my students several questions like why did the cups keep filling up with rain and how can we solve this problem? Each time I had them turn and talk to share their responses, then we'd bring it back whole group and share as a class. There were some good suggestions, like pouring out the water after the rain, but then one student suggested that by doing this we might accidentally pour out the seeds with it, so instead, we should use a spoon to scoop out the water. But what about on the weekends when we're not at school? Surely the plants will have had enough time to drown on the weekends when we are not here. So even though we can scoop the water out during the week, what were we going to do over the weekend?
Students suggested taking the cups home or keeping them inside our classroom, but again these also presented problems. What if we forgot to bring our plants back to school or left them on the bus? Another student then suggested bringing the plants inside during the weekends. Plants still need water and sunlight to grow; how would they get that in our classroom with nobody here on the weekends?
We took out our science notebooks and drew up some plans for our new cups. We then shared these with our classmates, too.