Continuing and revising our mini-studies

We've been continuing our work on our mini-studies, as mentioned in a previous blog entry. 

Pencils, tagged and being tracked

Students were given three choices for the subject of their study last week, and we've spent the time since then collecting data and fine-tuning (or radically redesigning) our data collection instruments. 

Designing a study

We're back to a project involving observational science this week, as students are tasked with creating individual studies to document the fluctuations of temperature in the middle school, the flow of traffic on Platt Road, or the mysterious travels taken by pencils in the S-K middle school. 

Pencils with odd markings are showing up all over the middle school. Each one is from the study of a different student, attempting to track its movements through Summers-Knoll. 

The inspiration for the pencil banding.

Each student is designing their own study, developing a data collection instrument, and attempting to gather data in a useful, meaningful way. By the end of the week, we should be able to draw some conclusions based on the information that we've collected.

Friday County Farm Project time

Last Friday, we spent most of the afternoon in County Farm Park collecting data for our projects. Jules, one of our advisors from the University of Michigan joined us to help out. 

In the field, exploring Fox Prairie. 

County Farm Park projects with City of Ann Arbor Naturalists

We spent this afternoon tromping through Britton Woods in County Farm Park with two guest speakers from the City of Ann Arbor. 

The kids explained their various projects to our guest speakers, then set off to data collection and discussion with our experts. Questions were asked and advice was sought. Some students were able to refine their studies a bit, setting the stage for a full afternoon in the park this Friday afternoon. 

Malletts Creek

County Farm Park project research

We spent part of the afternoon in County Farm Park again, planning our projects. Today's focus was on trying out some of our data collection ideas, and preparing questions for our naturalist guest experts on Monday afternoon.

Classroom guest! Tree identification with Jules

We had a guest speaker today! This morning, Jules came in to talk to us about plant identification. We took a walking tour of the Summers-Knoll campus, examining them and using a dichotomous key to identify the specific species of trees found around our school.

Here, Jules points out the features of the Norway Maple in front of the school. We also examined a large Silver Maple in our courtyard, a Scotch Pine (sometimes referred to as a "volcano tree"), a Black Pine, and some Common Buckthorn.

 Jules will be helping us shape our County Farm Park projects in the days ahead.

Art class in County Farm Park

We had a special, extended Art class with Monica on Wednesday. We spent it doing close observation drawings of various plants in County Farm Park. Here we see kids observing and admiring the results. These drawings are the first step toward learning how to make block prints later this year. (And they'll likely be included in our County Farm Park class project.)