Inquiring Minds Want to Know

It seems like the new "normal" for student teaching is having abnormal weeks. This week we had Monday off, Friday with no students in the building (like usual), and a virtual day on Thursday due to weather (again), making it so I only saw kids in person two days this week. Despite only seeing A group and B group in person once each this week, we certainly made the most out of these two days! I was able to do two inquiry based labs/activities in this short time with the kids (talk about tiring, though!)

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The first inquiry lab was during Fish and Wildlife. Right now we are talking about adaptations and why animals adapt. We played "Battle of the Beaks" which is a lab that models Darwin's finches in the Galapagos Islands, where he first discovered natural selection. The lab had students in small groups of about four, with each student having a different "beak" (tweezers, fork, clothespin, spoon). They then all competed for one food source at a time for the first round (available food sources were M&Ms, marshmallows, gummy worms, and paper clips), and then competed for all the food sources at once, with the bird eating the least amount of food at the end of the round getting eliminated. 

It was so cool to see the students start to form these connections between the activity and what were talking about with adaptations. They started to grasp what a generalist is versus a specialist when sharing out about the strategies they used when trying to collect food (for example - some students said they focused on one food, while others said they just grabbed whatever they could). Then they started to understand better that its not just that the most fit animal in an area survives, but that they are then the one to pass down the genes that allows them to best survive in that area.

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The second inquiry activity was during Plant and Greenhouse Science. This was my first day taking over this group and we are starting on a short unit about the horticulture industry, so I wanted something that demonstrated the importance of this industry. I thought back to our pre-internship seminar when we did an inquiry lab on food security, and I had an idea to take that activity and message it a little to fit what I wanted. This lab had students looking into what food security is and what factors contribute to it. They go through some discussion questions, rank a list of countries on most food secure to least food secure, and then look at the Food Security Index and the factors that uses to rank countries. In order to get this activity to make sense with the unit were talking about, I started off the lesson by introducing the horticulture industry and the three main sub-sectors of it. Students then brainstormed some careers and what sector those careers would fit under, and we discussed what they wrote down and why. We then transitioned into the food security content, and wrapped up the lesson by coming back to the horticulture industry by using the new knowledge the students have about global food security and seeing how the horticulture industry fit into combatting the issue of food insecurity. 

Overall I thought the lesson was very successful and the students seemed engaged and we were able to have some thought provoking and productive conversations about food security, what the horticulture industry is, and how plant science and horticulture have a role in aiding this issue.