Category Archives: NSTA 2010

NSTA 2010

I, along with four of our other Science Coaches were privileged enough to be able to attend NSTA this year in Philadelphia. I was also able to present with Steven and his wife Amy. I met Steven through a partnership our school district had with Purdue University for the past three years. He is one of the Outreach coordinators and I attended the academy for three summers. Our grant has just run out, but I am thrilled that I was able to be one of the lucky ones in attendance for all three years!

As coaches, we attended NSTA this year to learn more about what our positions could entail in the future. I attended one session where I heard some great ideas for video taping lessons where we would be teaching critical Science Process Skills and then learned how to share them with a small cohort of science leaders.

Here are some pictures of our 4 1/2 days there, some touristy and some from the conference…enjoy!! 🙂

Posted in NSTA 2010

Ice, Ice, Baby!

Jan 22

Posted by Kristen Poindexter

For the past two weeks, we’ve been experimenting with ice. This is the first unit this year that has been truly all inquiry. Usually, I have to provide some leading questions (ok, MANY leading questions!) to get us around to where we need to be, but this time, it took only three.

What do you know about ice?
What are your experiences with ice?
When do we usually see ice?

We only got the first one answered and went in a completely different direction than what I had planned (at least that’s what I wanted them to think!!). I was expecting to use the other two questions and after 2 weeks now, we still haven’t gotten around to answering them!! Did I mention I LOVE INQUIRY??

Below are some pictures of the things we have been doing. Most of the charts you can probably figure out, but we did two experiments and I wanted to explain them at bit.
Yesterday, after talking about ice and how to get rid of it, we determined that we wanted to test different types of salt. I happened to have (wink, wink) rock salt and table salt in the room along with some ice and cups. We had 5 different types of things to test to determine how best to get rid of ice; the sun (a flashlight), our hands, rock salt, table salt, and a base (the control group). We waited 5 minutes and then measured to see how much water was in each one.
Today, we used dirt, gravel, hot water, and sea salt to try the experiment again. This time we used an ice journal to record our findings. I am presenting at NSTA in Philadelphia in March and this is part of what I will be sharing.

Okay, now on the to the pictures: