Exploring Alaska Final Project

Water Cycle Unit: Water as Life

Objective:

To create a lesson plan that not only teaches the basic requirements of the water cycle according to the Anchorage School District, but also incorporates knowledge from Alaska Native Cultures, uses the Alaska Native cultures as examples that demonstrate the importance of the water cycle in daily life, and to incorporate other aspects of general science knowledge to ultimately create a unit in which science is Integrated and presented in ways that emphasize the relevancy of the concepts in daily life.

Class Outline:

Day One: Water Cycle Vocab

Day Two: Water Cycle background reading

Day Three: Water Cycle in Native life

Day Four: Water Cycle Diagram/Wheel

Day Five:  Water Cycle videos and animations

Day Six: Water Cycle Lab

Day Seven: Water Cycle Lab wrap-up, phase change discussion

Day Eight: Liquid Water on Mars project worktime

Day Nine: Liquid Water on Mars worktime and presentations

Day Ten: The relevancy of Native Knowledge

Detailed Description:

On day one and day two of the Water Cycle Unit I currently teach, students are introduced to basic vocabulary, such as condensation, precipitation, and evaporation, and given a brief overview of how the cycle works and its importance for life on Earth.

Before moving into the diagram of the cycle as we have done in the past, I will now add a day focusing on the importance of water for native ways of living in Alaska. We will begin with the list of Ocean Superlatives and Fascinating Facts. After giving students time for discussion in small groups, I will then introduce Google Earth on the Smartboard, using various views and functions to show that 70% of Earth’s surface is covered by water. Students will have the opportunity to see different views of Alaska, and we will focus on the amount of coastline, the frozen and liquid areas of water, and reiterate the fact that all water eventually returns to the ocean at some point-especially the numerous rivers covering the state.

At this point, I will show the movies “Living from the Land and Sea,” and “The Spirit of Subsistence Living,” found on Teacher’s Domain. At the end of the video, students will make personal lists of ways the ocean affects their life, and will share some of these ways with the class. I may (depending on the class) use some of the discussion points provided with the video to further encourage student interaction with the material presented in the videos.

Using the idea that everything is connected, I will take a day to introduce students to the water cycle diagram, and have them create their “water cycle wheels,” a fun art projects that provides a hands-on illustration of the water cycle. To support the diagramming activities in class, we will use several videos and activities on Teacher’s Domain, including the “Water Cycle Animation” from NASA, and “Cycling Water through the Environment.”  A lab on changing water temperature, demonstrating where energy needs to be added to the cycle fits perfectly at this point, and allows for a segway into a brief introduction to the state of matter, a concept we cover in depth at a later time in the year. The lab on changing water temperature can be modified to include a lesson on state change, or can be followed with a diagram showing the correlation between energy and phase change, combined with a class discussion. For background and supporting information (students come up with some tricky questions!) this discussion of phase changes is a good resource.

To wrap up the unit, students will complete the NASA activity “Is There Liquid Water on Mars?” and discuss what changes would be needed to the conditions on Mars to make the water cycle possible there. In this way, they demonstrate their understanding of the phases or states of water, the steps of the water cycle, and the necessary catalysts and conditions for water to travel through each step. Students will complete the project by describing how the water cycle would is necessary to colonizing Mars. Using their lists, the earlier videos, and class discussion, students will come up with individual paragraph responses describing how and why colonists would depend on a water cycle on Mars. Class sharing of responses would give me the change to reiterate the value of the knowledge native tribes have about the world in which we live and on which we depend.

Module IX: Terrestrial Ice

“Laura thought of the lost and lonely houses, each one alone and blind and cowering in the fury of the storm. There were houses in town, but not even a light from one of them could reach another. And the town was all alone on the frozen, endless prairie, where snow drifted and winds howled and the whirling blizzard put out the stars and the sun.” The Long Winter, Laura Ingalls Wilder

When I was young, the series of books written by Laura Ingalls Wilder about pioneer life captivated me. Some of my favorite stories were about the great blizzards that swept across the plain, raging for days a time, leaving feet of snow behind and freezing anyone or anything unlucky enough to be caught outside. Growing up in Colorado, I knew about snow, but never had the chance to experience a blizzard. I think the images in my head from the Little House stories were part of what drew me to Alaska as an adult.

Creating a Hook (Explain)
Relating what I learned in this module back to the stories I had heard about snow and ice as a child again reminded me of the importance of finding a "hook," something in a lesson that grabs students' attention and motivates them to learn the science behind what is happening. The Alaska Native Knowledge Network, introduced in Module IX-Cultural Connections, has a number of stories and activities that all students, and especially native students, can identify with. The maps and atlases section provides several maps of different areas of Alaska, with place names and geological features in the native language of the tribe(s) indigenous to that area. This is very similar to some of the learning I shared with my students from Module II, when we looked at the names of different landforms. How exciting to be making connections across the course like this!

Justifying Curriculum (Explain)
I was also very excited about the Curriculum Spiral Chart that Carolyn found on their site-this is a great way to lay out knowledge, and to show how less obviously related topics tie in to the state standards for teaching science. It will also give students a visual answer to the question "Why are we doing this?" I think that the spiral chart will be a valuable resource in my toolbox.

Making Connections (Extend)
I made several of the same connections from the course information to "real life" that other course participants did. Like Ernestine, I could relate the information on salinity to experiences I've had with salting icy sidewalks and making ice cream. Like Konrad, I found the Earth's Cryosphere clip on Teacher's Domain to be a striking visual illustration of howmuch ice, especially in the form of terrestrial ice (glaciers) we are losing in the Arctic regions. One of my favorite lessons to do with students is a comparison of Glaciers: Then and Now. The Cryosphere video will be an amazing introduction to that activity!

Evaluate
Like all of the Modules in this course, I found some resources-like the information on the Alaska Native Knowledge Network that I brought to school and used with the students this past week. I also found a number of lessons and activities, like the 1000 Snowflakes activity, that I plan to use either later this year or in units next year. My Water Cycle unit has always been one of my more bland units. Now, it will be much more interactive, and the knowledge level will go beyond the superficial vocabulary we've covered in the past. 

Module VII: Culture and Climate

Explain
Module VII started out with videos and information about the composition of the atmosphere and the early formation of our solar system, and I found myself again disappointed, wishing I had discovered this information about six weeks earlier. But the blog entry "Module VII: Carbon Connections" showed me some exciting ways to tie that information into my third quarter units on Chemistry! More than anything lately, the Explore Alaska course is showing  me how to make seventh grade Integrated Science truly integrated. I've tried to show connections and integrate different science topics as I teach students each year, but the connections and resources on Teacher's Domain are showing me better ways to make the connections meaningful and relevant, rather than superficial lip service.

Extend
The videos in the above-mentioned blog entry, along with the Cosmos video clip from Dave's Blog, will be excellent starting points for students' introduction to the periodic table. Focusing on carbon specifically will not only provide a good connecting theme as we learn about atomic number, mass, electron orbits, and other basic elemental facts, but will also allow me to refocus students on the idea we began with at the beginning of the year: that everything is a cycle. Not only are we drinking the same water that the dinosaurs did, we are also eating the same carbon that made up their bodies millions of years ago. That is definitely a concept that will grab students' attention!

Evaluate
As I mentioned above, the videos about elements will be the starting point for this year's units on the Periodic Table and Elements.  Much of the other information in the blog was equally useful for my own understanding. While a lot of the carbon cycle information is probably far beyond the scope of my curriculum (and my student's current abilities), it reinforced for me the importance of giving students a basic understanding of this information, since the decisions they make as adults will have such an immediate and important impact on the direction life on Earth takes. Even if I don't directly tackle the big issues with them, I'm providing a foundation for them to understand this information over their next decade of education and experience.

Three Colleagues
Not only were the resources in the Explore Alaska modules interesting and useful, but I found several of my colleagues blogs equally beneficial. Dave's blog has the aforementioned great video clip suggestion for my students.  Martha's blog is filled with wonderful quotations related to the module, some of which could be used as writing and/or discussion prompts for students. Janet's blog made me hope that she will share more of her husband's photos from his travels around the state.

Atmosphere: a particular environment or surrounding influence.

Explore:

The atmosphere has always been one of the most difficult units for me to teach. I find it relatively difficult to understand, and not particularly exciting. Especially since moving to Alaska, I feel very disconnected from much of the locally-relevant atmosphere topics-especially this week, as I again struggled to find ways to relate to the material.

One of the things that helped me begin to relate to the material was reviewing other participants' blogs. Dave's blog had several interesting facts, and I especially enjoyed his explanation for the bubbles he often sees in ice over the permafrost. I also found the ideas Eric presented in his blog intriguing, and I was introduced to the tragedy of the commons, a social phenomena I had not heard of before.

Much of the information related to the atmosphere inspires negative emotions in me-global warming, pollution, and high levels of toxins collecting in the environment around the world. There is so much bad news about human impact on the natural world, and on humans ourselves, that it feels like an insurmountable challenge. Is there any good news out there about the atmosphere?!

Extend:

Unfortunately, my students and I have already completed most of the atmosphere curricula for this year, but I will briefly revisit weather with my students during January, and I am looking forward to incorporating this weather site that I found through a link on Alicia's blog. I plan to share many of the food-chain resources on Teacher's Domain with my colleagues in eighth grade, since they spend a lot of time on that topic in their Biology Unit. 

Evaluate

This module was helpful to me simply as a reminder of the importance of relevancy in my own lessons-if I don't find a hook to draw students in, they won't be motivated to learn the facts and background information they need to know.

Also, as the course progresses I find myself becoming less sure of myself and my blog posts, and this is impacting my ability to understand and intake the material as it is presented. This is a great example of how many of my students must feel when we get too focused on the test and their performance in class, instead of simply learning for the sake of acquiring knowledge and satisfying curiousity about the world in which we live-my real goal for them, and myself.

Module V Blog Review

I was feeling incredibly overwhelmed by coursework during this last module. Much of it was my own fault, in getting excited, taking long tangents of exploration into topics on Teacher Domain, and then procrastinating when it came to the actual writing of my response. So it was comforting tonight to see a surprising number of blogs that have not been updated since the first few modules.

Fellow slackers aside, I've struggled to keep my posts to a short length that doesn't overwhelm readers with text. So this week, I focused on concise, well-written and to-the-point blogs, in hopes that their style would rub off a bit. I especially enjoyed James White's blog, Sandi Pahlke's blog, and Kevin Hamrick's blog. The writing was excellent without tending to wordiness or large text blocks. Good examples for my inspiration!

Module V

Photo by Daniel Y Go

 Cloudy skies by day mean cooler temperatures, but cloudy skies after dark mean a warmer night.

istockphoto.com

 

We can ice skate on water because our weight on the narrow blade of the skate compresses the solid ice into its denser form: liquid water.Water is the only substance on Earth known to have a less-dense solid-state.

These are a couple of the many facts about water I "soaked up like a sponge" as I was growing up. I was fascinated in high school science to learn that we are only able to survive on Earth because ice floats, allowing the oceans to remain liquid.

http://www.stevegarufi.com/coloradodesert.htm

Where I Came From
Growing up in Colorado, I was about as far away from the ocean as I could get in North America, and so the ocean always held its own mistique and allure. It wasn't until late in elementary school that I first saw a world map with physical features not only on land, but also illustrated underwater. I was captivated by the idea of these immense, unknown depths. Today, I introduce my seventh-graders to science in part by explaining to them how little we know about much of our world, especially the oceans. Science is not a stagnant memorization of endless facts dead white guys discovered hundereds of years ago. Science is barely getting started-and the mysteries of the deep are a perfect example of how much there is for new scientists-today's students-to study and learn.

Where I Am
Every day, I learn more about how little I actually know-and this week's module on the oceans is a perfect example of this. I've read about climate change, I teach my students about seasons, and I've watched/demonstrated/talked about the ice to water to steam lab and graphs more times than I can count. Yet until this unit, I never really thought about how those things were interrelated. So I have to stop and ask-have I really understood these concepts if I've always seen and thought about them as seperate? Have I done a really good job of teaching any of those ideas to my students, if I haven't at least touched on the interconnectedness of the oceans, the seasons, and the weather?

Where I Will Go
This module took concepts I'd always enjoyed, and in fact, been slightly in awe of, and showed me ways to communicate that awe to my students. Every science teacher I've met agrees that some topics are inherently more difficult to understand than others; for middle school, seasons and density seem to be difficult topics to teach <i>well.</i> The idea of density is easy to get across, but the importance, the excitement I feel for the subject seems lost on my students.The examples, explanations, and topics in this unit make me question my students' actual grasp of the fundamentals of density-is the excitement lacking because their understanding is superficial? Teaching about seasons presents an inverse challenge: students have such an intrinsic, common-sense understanding of seasons that they have little motivation to dive into the science behind what they see outside their window.Putting it into a globalcontext that illustrates the deeper levels of connection and science behind "rain," "cloudy," and "wind" might be just the key I was searching for. I look forward to using all of the resources in this unit, especially the "Reason for the Season" resources!

The Map I’ll Follow
One of the Evaluate questions that jumped out at me this week was at the end of Density of Density Differences: How useful are simple labs and/or YouTube for your professional purposes? I cannot think of anything this year that I have been more excited about, that is more directly relevant, or that I would predict will have a bigger positive impact on my teacing and my students’ learning than the simple demonstrations, labs, and YouTube videos in this module.

http://www.ehow.com/shoe-decor/

Module Four: Blowing Things Up

Drama and excitement are integral parts of my lessons in middle school. Students come to their first real science course with one question: “When do we get to blow stuff up?” (My administrators ask me the same question, but with much less enthusiasm.) Since I like my job, and would like to keep it for a few more years, I have to compromise between the two groups-and volcanoes are the perfect way to do so. Anchorage School District curriculum doesn’t provide extensive ways to cover volcanoes in seventh grade, but I always manage to squeeze a day or two in during our rock cycle unit. Students love to see pictures and videos of volcanic eruptions, and the prospect of getting to simulate an eruption on a much smaller scale is motivation enough for most to complete the less exciting classwork during the unit.

After watching the clips and reading the information for Module 4, however, I’m inspired to include more of these student-friendly cataclysmic events by tying them into our motion and forces unit. The various media portraying volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, and earthquakes provide excellent examples of forces at work on earth, and the resulting damage gives me an opportunity to talk about all three of Newton’s Laws. (As an aside, this site provides a great explanation of Newton's Three Laws for anyone who is interested. It isn't classroom appropriate, unfortunately.) Only being in Alaska for 5 years, I'm unfamiliar with most of the local geologic history, and I've found it fascinating to learn about local cataclysmic events. The 1958 Lituya Bay tsunami really stuck in my mind, and I've retold the story several times since to others who hadn't heard it.

Ultimately, I love to include volcanoes, earthquakes, and tsunamis in my lessons because they are relevant to the students in a truly real way. Students today are overwhelmed with computer-generated, Hollywood stuntman, tweaked, twisted, airbrushed, don’t try this at home impossibilities. But when I show them an erupting volcano or roaring, massive tsunami, there’s nothing fake about it. Being able to teach these types of lessons in Alaska is especially meaningful to students because it is such a seismically active area. Everyone here has a story to tell-especially about the 1964 earthquake. Suddenly, parents, relatives, and other adults in my students’ lives aren’t an annoyance or embarrassment, they’re a source of stories as good or better than this week’s latest release at the movie theatre.

To incorporate earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis into my forces unit, I used the “download” feature on Teacher Domain for the first time this week. (We can't access many videos/clips/streaming media at school.) I was not only able to share the video clips easily with my students, but I was able to show them on my SmartBoard-a recent addition to my classroom. I was pretty impressed with myself! I was also able to bring GoogleEarth into my lesson. The realtime earthquake feature was a favorite for both myself and my classes. We also explored the USGS Earthquake website, and the Alaska Earthquake Information Center. I also found a site that shows several ways to recreate volcanic eruptions-on a much smaller scale-in the classroom. I am working on ways to tie this activity into our forces unit, so that the students can finally “blow something up,” like they’re so eager to do.

Not only did I learn a great deal about cataclysmic events and general earth science concepts during my work on Module Four, I was also able to bring a great deal of it into the classroom right away (my students think the Explore Alaska class is the coolest class EVER.) I also had several parents email me to let me know what a great conversation started the cataclysmic events were at home. Some had better conversations with their students that evening than they had in a while(!). In the future, I would like to expand this part of the forces unit to include guest speakers from the community, who can briefly share their personal experiences of natural disasters, and reinforce the relevancy of this topic for my students.

Module III: Blog Review

As mentioned in my module III blog post, I greatly enjoyed Dan's and Cheryl's commentary on Module III. I found both points of view aligned with my ideas and thoughts on this week's activities, and gave me new things to think about, both in my own learning and with regard to my classroom.

I was impressed by Amy's photo citations. Giving credit to sources is important, but something I struggle with, and while it is not officially part of the curriculum, I will make it a personal challenge to begin providing photo credits like the ones on Amy's blog.

Module III: Landforms and Culture

Are we reaching a time when our essential landforms stop being part of the land?

The Week Three module was interesting to me because I can relate, albeit loosely, to the idea of being formed by the landscape around me. My parents raised my sister and me to have a constant awareness of the landscape around us. Knowing the names of mountains, rivers, animals, and plants was a "game" we played whenever we were out. Knowing about the natural world around us was something we did automatically, and even now I find myself testing myself on the names of the features and organisms around me in my new home-Alaska. Because of that background, I was especially captivated by the double names for famous mountains presented in Module III: Landform Forces. I spent a great deal of time on Wikipedia, looking up well-known landforms and learning the history, legends, and stories behind them. I shared a few of the local or native names for famous landforms with my students, and found many of them to be equally interested. I would like to use these examples of double names to introduce students to the idea of classification later in the year. Trying to work amongst varying  languages, cultures and customs makes effective communication more difficult, and seems to be a primary stumbling block in cross-cultural scientific learning and sharing. As we explore the different names for both landforms and organisms in Alaska and around the world, students will get a clear idea of why a standardized form of scientific naming is so vital.

I knew just what Cheryl meant when she described going to college in ID, and realizing not everywhere had glaciers, volcanoes, and earthquakes. I was equally amazed by our family vacations when I was young. Growing up in Colorado, I had no idea that there were places where you couldn’t tell the direction from the mountains on the horizon, or where summer and fall were as green as spring instead of fading to dusty brown. I was amazed by the desert in Nevada, and completely in love with the oceans off Florida’s shores. Over the last few years, I’ve been startled and disappointed to learn that several of the students in my classes each year have never traveled outside of the Anchorage bowl. Even more have never been outside of Alaska, and very few have been outside the country-even including Canada! I try to show my students a variety of pictures, movies, and written depictions of places around the world. Google Earth, especially Google Earth 3D will be an invaluable tool as I expose my classes to places outside of Anchorage. Zooming in from a map they are familiar with to focus on a place that they have never seen before will allow them to realize that these are real places, not simply the creation of a director’s fantasy on a movie set, or programming tricks in a video game. Just as Dan said this week in his blog, visual learners especially will benefit from seeing real images of the place I'm describing, rather than just hearing or reading about places as abstract ideas. 

I especially enjoyed Module III because it took a subject I was already familiar with and interested in, and showed me valuable ways to better incorporate landscapes and their influence on cultures into my curriculum-and personal learning! To paraphrase Richard Glenn, the resources I explored as part of this module provide me with several more flashlights.

Connections: Week Two

Connection: a link; an association; reference or relation to another. Connection is created or strengthened in every interaction between two things. Connection does not require awareness, let alone acquiescence. Connections are rarely neutral, but the nature-good or bad-of the connection is an opinion based greatly upon what role the judger plays in the relationship. Culture, instincts, habits, and behaviors are all created from and reliant upon connection.

Indigenous people and Western scientists seem to differ fundamentally in their regard for connection. Indigenous people’s awareness, acceptance, and respect for connection, measured against Western scientists’ ignorance, disregard, and often outright dismissal of connection, has created a stereotype portrayed endlessly in books, movies, and life around the world. As is often the case in the “might makes right” history of the world, Western views tend to predominate and at times overwhelm indigenous people’s views and beliefs.

Western views, both scientific and common, seem to view connection and control as synonymous. In every interaction, Western science seeks ultimately to control the objects, entities, and systems with which it is connecting. Western science seeks understanding of “how” and “why” as a means to exert influence and control. Indigenous people also seek to understand the “how” and “why” of the processes and things in their world. But native people seek understanding for an entirely different purpose: not to control, but to coexist. Rather than bending the world to their needs and wants, indigenous people use their understanding of the world to adapt themselves to their surroundings. This fundamental difference in purpose can be seen in the teaching methods of Western vs. native cultures. In Western cultures, we have “scientists”-people with fancy titles who work in “labs”-sterile locations far removed from the common people and daily life. In native cultures, knowledge of the world is considered a basic knowledge that every member of the community needs to have in order to function to their highest potential.

It is only recently that Western science has begun to realize the value of the Native ways of relating to, studying, and understanding the world around us. By seeing the interconnectedness of everything-in and outside of this world-Western science has begun to undergo a paradigm shift. Rather than perceiving the world and our connections to it simply as a resource to be mined, with everything not directly beneficial to the miner cast aside without thought, Western science and culture has begun to embrace the connections that exist in some way between everything in existence. The Butterfly Effect is a monumental example of Western science beginning to see the value of regarding the world from a different perspective-an indigenous perspective.

Global climate change provides another example of how Western science for too long ignored connections between people and the earth that were not valuable or controllable. Because the changes wrought globally by Western technological advances were neither controllable or profitable, scientists were content for a long time to simply ignore the warning signs plainly obvious to anyone paying attention (as many native tribes were). Now, scientists are not only turning to indigenous people for data (recognition and understanding of the connections between humans and our surroundings), but are in turn teaching indigenous people to use Western technology to better recognize, understand, and adapt to natural objects and processes.

Indigenous views of connection allow people to live comfortably in the environment, to understand the impacts of altering that world, and to adapt ourselves to our surroundings in positive and meaningful ways. Western science can provide tools and information about the natural world that leads to a deeper understanding of our role and impact on Earth and in the universe. By working together, and by melding Western understanding with Native awareness, we can use the infinite connections that exist to enhance our lives without compromising anyone or anything else’s.

It is this melding of Western and native views that needs to be taught in the classroom. Too often in popular culture today, the Earth and her resources are seen as expendable, with little regard for the consequences of such instant gratification for the masses. If science classrooms focus more on the infinite, ever-changing connections that exist everywhere, rather than on labs that students do “just because they can,” there is a chance to integrate Western and indigenous approaches to science. By focusing on connections-and the inevitable consequences, good and bad, of those connections-students today can learn not only to enjoy the resources available to them, but to use our ever-improving technology and knowledge to strengthen and support vital connections human life depends upon.

My Favorite Place (Week One)

I have a number of places that are special to me, either for the memories they hold, the way their beauty takes my breath away, the emotions of excitement, peace, or wonder they create in me, or simply the physical qualities they embody-smells, sounds, sights that appeal to me on some level. Some of these places are back in Colorado where I grew up, others are vacation destinations, others I've only experienced vicariously through books, pictures, and stories.

Of all the places in my mind, though, I have to choose my favorite not simply because it meets all of the above criteria of good memories, pleasant associations, and a location that will never leave my list of travel destinations, but also because it is right down the road. This place, in fact, is at the end of the road: the Homer Spit.

The Homer Spit was a place I discovered on accident. My touristy weekends during my first few years in Alaska never took me that direction down the Kenai Penninsula-instead, my wanderings south always seemed to end somewhere between Girdwood and Seward. It wasn't until a dinner party when someone mentioned the Eagle Lady that I even considered the idea of heading down to Homer.

It was March of 2008 when I first packed the car for an overnight trip to Homer. I arrived late in the afternoon, and Herbie-my trusty travel companion-and I spent the rest of the sunlit hours on the beach. I collected rocks and shells, smelled the sea air, and tried not to freeze. Herbie was smart enough not to get in the water, but explored every inch of beach exposed to him.

Our reason for the trip had been to see one of the last eagle feeding ever to take place on the Spit-and the sight of almost 400 bald eagles waiting, feeding, perching, and flying over the tiny area near the end of the Spit was beyond description. My favorite memory of that morning was the young eagle who walked (waddled?) up behind all of the photographers, examining them with the same curiosity and enthusiasm that they were snapping pictures with.

Beyond the eagles, though, I fell in love with the wide open expanses of water, the smell of the air, the sight of the dark gray stones intermixed with beach treasures-shells, white quartz stones rubbed smooth by the waves, and driftwood of every shape and size. Even the cold was invigorating, and Herbie felt the same way-we were both instantly in love with everything about the Spit.

We've been back several times since, and the Spit never fails to disappoint. It will always be one of my-our-favorite places.