https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6mVyaNI92o
DISTRICT 97 – Sixth-grader Bella Baker wanted to make one last makeshift rocket before her Brooks Middle School class concluded their science experiment that afternoon.
She and her other dozen or so classmates, along with their teacher Tom Reising, were outside near the commons conducting their experiment.
Small “pops” and “booms” could be heard as rocket after rocket shot off. The students used index cards and empty toilet paper rolls as their rocket’s body, placed on top of a small empty camera film container filled with water and Alka-Seltzer tablets.
“Boom” goes another one.
The students were seeing how much water or tables were needed to make their rockets fly following an initial hypothesis. Some students painted and put wings and other designs on their rockets. Some flew knee-high while others shot up as high as some of the kids.
Baker’s rocket flew up near eye level, as well as to a couple of her impressed classmates.
The afternoon’s experiment was part of an assignment the students have been working on so far this school year, part of the district’s Common Core studies.
“What they’re working with today is either changing how many Alka-Seltzer tablets they put into their canister or how much water because we talked about changing only one variable at a time to see what’s affecting the data,” Reising explained. “They’re trying to record how high the rocket goes and how long it takes before it launches.”
The Common Core standards for science include students “comparing and contrasting information gained from experiments, simulations, video or multimedia sources with that gained from reading a text on the same topic.”
The rocket experiment was designed to accomplish that standard. Another science standard involves students learning to distinguish facts and reasoned judgment, based on research findings.
But these new standards are not a “curriculum” rolled in and out on a particular day but an ongoing process of teaching and learning, explained Brooks Principal Mike Michowski, in an interview earlier this school year about the district’s rollout of Common Core.
There is still some confusion and misunderstanding about what Common Core is among some families, Michowski said. Brooks and other schools in the district are educating parents about Common Core at events like Parent Night at the start of the school year. But the district will be doing more educating as the year goes on, said D97 spokesperson Chris Jasculca.
Michowski noted that seeing how Common Core works, instead of trying to explain it, was the best way for people to learn about it. In classrooms like Reising’s, Common Core — which includes standards covering reading and math, history and language arts — is being infused throughout the district’s curriculum.
The science lesson with the rockets is not too different from what Reising’s done in the past.
“The biggest push is the compare and contrast; that’s something I’ve kind of added with Common Core,” he said. “Before that, it would have just been lab analysis and then a write-up. But now not only do I have them doing a write-up, I want them to compare and contrast their data, or make a claim based on evidence. What can you claim based on the evidence you’ve gathered?”
This lesson is his students’ introduction to the scientific method of experimentation to figure things out, and it’s also a fun experiment, said Reising. The idea of using makeshift rockets, he said, came from another science teacher.
His students will analyze their data from the rocket experiment later on.
“With science, we were probably already doing a lot of the Common Core because it’s a growth model. I can’t introduce everything at once to them or it’ll overwhelm them. So give them little bits and pieces and assess it along the way,” he said. “With this lab report we probably won’t be there until sometime after winter break — actually writing everything out for a lab report.”
For Linda Chrystall’s fourth-grade class at Mann Elementary, lessons covering the reading and literacy standards were a bit overwhelming at the start of the school year but they’ve gotten more comfortable with it, she said.
On this particular day, her students were critiquing each other’s answers from their previous reading assignments.
While looking at sentences on a LCD projector, students were asked what could be added to sentences to better understand what their classmates were thinking in their answers. The goal, though, wasn’t so much on sentence structuring but “showing your thinking” in solving a problem.
Some students said certain words could be added to an answer. Drawing a picture was something else that could be used.
“This is just to get them thinking on how to solve problems,” Chrystall said. “Earlier in the year, some students were in tears and were like ‘I want to quit.’ But then they were like ‘I want to try some more’ and now it’s going much better for them. It’s really about that idea of perseverance and thinking through a problem.”