Designing Family Investigations for Remote Science Learning

It has been eight weeks since our Burlington Schools were closed due to the spread of coronavirus through our community. What was once a temporary inconvenience as turned into a remote learning trial by fire for school district’s across the state and country!

At the outset, our work at the Burlington Science Center focused on generating informal challenges that children and families could engage with and directing families to high quality, freely accessible resources like the NSTA “Think Like a Scientist” eBooks. But as we have moved from simply meeting the social/emotional needs of our students our work has expanded into multi-step investigations with students recording data, generating claims, and constructing explanations based on their observations.

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Community Challenge #6: Ball and Ramp Investigation Balls and Ramps are an excellent way to explore concepts in physics like forces, momentum, and the relationship between an object's energy, mass and motion. Encourage your children to identify or come up with indicators of how much energy a ball has as it moves down and off the ramp. Action figures, used toilet paper rolls, or simply measuring the distance the ball rolls until it comes to a complete stop if you have the space. Consider exploring how you are smartphone might be used as a scientific tool. Many cameras now come with slow motion features that can slow down time to allow more precise measurement of how long it takes a ball to roll down a hill from start to finish. Or simply allow children to play with the timer tool. how do inclines affect an object speed? No greater time to find out than a cold cloudy or rainy day! The different amount of friction surfaces generate as a ball rolls by can also be explored. Orient this investigation around what your child seems uncertain about to make the most of it and be sure to have fun in the process!

A post shared by Burlington Science Center (@burlingtonsciencecenter) on Mar 25, 2020 at 3:59am PDT

Our first iteration of “Family Science Challenges” will be hitting our district’s ‘choice boards’ next Monday. Designed to be completed as a family unit, they aim to give flexibility to families with multiple children in grade school that may not have the time and energy to complete individual investigations for each and every budding scientist. They also hone everyone’s attention on to the scientific practices and content outlined as our “power standards” from the state.

Each Family Science Challenge centers on a question or engineering challenge. Family members share what they think they know, with each student recording their thinking in a science notebook designed to support each successive investigation. Families then conduct an investigation that checks their thinking and provides scientific data to apply to the next step in the challenge. Scientific vocabulary is provided through online read-alouds and/or short videos from trusted sources or created by Wendy Pavlicek and I.

Because of the shortened expectation of time on learning, usually three stages of the investigation are all that is “required” for completion of a challenge from a classwork completion standpoint. But each challenge also includes extension investigations with notes encouraging specific grade levels that would have otherwise experienced such learning face to face, or in preparation of scientific exploration in the following academic year.

While each investigation has been created in Google Slides, our district’s investment in the online classroom tool Seesaw has led us to convert mirror lessons into our district’s activity library. These lessons are freely available to other district’s that use SeeSaw as well. We have found this tool to be handy as it provides easy ways to overlay verbal instructions to students and families for each investigation stage and notebook page.

I will continue to update this post with challenges as they are produced. Feedback to improve these challenges is appreciated or the simple acknowledgement that you are using them is also welcomed!

• Darken the Room Family Challenge and Notebook (Seesaw link)
• How Do Nature’s Forces Affect Earth’s Surface Family Challenge and Notebook (Seesaw link)
• What Do Plants Need to Grow Family Challenge and Notebook (Seesaw link)
• Updated 5/26: Energy Scavenger Hunt and Notebook (Seesaw link)
• Updated 5/26: Animal Habitat Engineering Challenge

A special thanks to our Library Media Specialists Jenn Scheffer and Michelle Ardizonni who provided support to the Science Center moving our Google created challenges over to the SeeSaw platform.