The Streaking of the Minerals!

The highlight of this past Monday's lesson was actually a writing assignment, which went over really well. In fact, it was better than we anticipated!

One of this weeks evaluation criteria was about including writing in our science lesson, so we decided to do a "How To Be" poem. A How To Be poem is composed of facts or statements about a certain thing. The example Ms. B gave me was from How To Be A Shark poem (find it on the last page of this handout) and had lines like: "Devour fish, or squid, or seals/And don’t worry if you break a tooth on a bone/Because you’ll grow 30,000 new ones in a lifetime." L and I agreed that this form would be perfect for our 4th graders, so we created a concept map based on How To Be A Rock!
We worked on the poems as a class and we were all impressed with the responses from our students. One of the best things about our 4th graders is the pure enthusiasm they exhibit as they approach nearly every task we give them. Once the students caught onto the structure of the poem they all had some fact to contribute. And nearly every line they contributed was a fact!
It was amazing to see how all the students participated!

It was wonderful to see how excited our teacher, Ms. B was at how well the process of writing poems came out. She confessed that she had never done anything like this in a science lesson and none of us anticipated it would end up being such a valuable assessment tool--which it was! L and I could easily ascertain what facts were popular as well as any misconceptions.



This week the students took part in their second field test, the streak test. I started off by demonstrating how to gently rub each mineral on both a white and black scratch plates to test the color of the minerals. The students would be testing the results of their scratch plate field test with the observable color of the mineral.

The students had plenty of time to complete this round of field tests and we closed out the lesson with a discussion about the similarities and differences between the observable color and scratch plate tests. Many students remarked about graphite--they were pleased that it left a dark mark when rubbed on both the white scratch plate and their science workbooks.