Keystone Weekly
volume 3, issue 10        November 26, 2001

This week's Key Points: *Kit Use: Experiments with Plants* and *Web Pick of the Week*
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Kit Use Through a KSN Teacher's Eyes: Experiments with Plants (STC)

Working with students in an Emotional Support class, Gloria McPherson has creatively integrated and adapted several kits for use in her curriculum. Gloria teaches at Capital Area IU 15 Mansberger School, part of the Capital Area Math/Science Alliance, and has worked with several STC and FOSS kits. We'll begin by discussing her experiences with STC's Experiments with Plants.

In Experiments with Plants, students investigate some of the variables that affect plant growth and development, and then design and conduct a controlled experiment to answer a specific question of their own. This is the main thrust of the kit study; Gloria adjusted and extended it to better suit her students' needs. Gloria says, "I selected this kit because I had previously worked with the FOSS Environments kit, and I wanted to compare the two. Our science curriculum is being revised to conform to the standards, but we still must adapt and modify content to fit the needs of the students in our Emotional Support program. . . . The study of plants is an important one, it is part of the standards, and it is relevant to students' daily lives to be aware of how things grow and what they contribute to life."

Gloria comments on STC's accessibility, comparing it to her experiences with FOSS kits: "I discovered that STC is more difficult to adapt for my students. I have students who are generally functioning slightly to moderately below grade level expectations, and who have very little motivation to complete academic tasks. I found the STC kit required more intense individual or small group work than my students were willing or able to tackle."

Gloria reports that the set-up for Experiments with Plants is somewhat involved, but not really difficult. "The kit has some fairly complicated physical components, because of the need to have all the separate plant containers, the watering systems, and the special lights."

In using the kit, Gloria says that both she and her students liked working with the fast plants, and they especially enjoyed them because they "could actually see the growth cycle in a reasonable short period of time." She says, "Most of my students responded very positively to this aspect of the kit." But the kit also leaned heavily in the direction of recording and journaling, which is a real challenge for her students: "This was a good point, but I had trouble getting quality writing out of my students because they would much rather look at things than record what they see!"

Gloria supplemented this STC kit with lots of materials from other sources to provide the information. She says, "I needed to focus on the content of what is a plant, what does it do for us, why do we need plants, what different kinds of plants are there, what are the parts of plants, etc."

The kit and extension activities Gloria devises does succeed in sparking curiosity about plants in general. She explains, "I think my students were able to make good connections between the plants and the printed information as far as the basic life cycle and the parts of the plants. They also were able to generalize this information to some other plants that we started from seeds. They have gone on to plant some squash seeds, and are very interested in them. We also planted some herbs, and I have a sweet potato plant that may live—they just broke off a couple of stems and put them in water, so wish us luck."

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Web Pick of the Week
National Geographic Education Guide
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/education/

I know that National Geographic resources have been profiled here before, but really, this site can't be visited too often. This section of their website in particular, the National Geographic Education Guide, is just amazingly rich and interesting. With more than one hundred in-depth online adventures; access to the quality maps and geographical resources that made National Geographic famous (taken several steps further online, with dynamic maps); lesson plan suggestions; a teacher's community center featuring information about online alliances and grant opportunities; and school products, you're sure to find plenty to engage your class and enrich your lessons.

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This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 9819641.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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