What Happened to the Ice...Continued

We are continuing to investigate the question Olivia presented to us yesterday. We launched our inquiry with a science talk to share our thinking from yesterday.  

To help us with our discussion we used our accountable talk stems and structured our discussion using the Harkness Discussion framework.  Since this was our first Harkness discussion, Mrs. Haney tracked our data using her document camera so we could see how the discussion was moving.  We are learning to share talk time and ensure that everyone has the opportunity to share.  

During a discussion we came up with a vocabulary word to describe what we were observing happen to the ice--melting.  A turning point in the discussion came when several students used the accountable talk stem "This reminds me of..."  Jordan remembered a science lab he had done in Kindergarten and SrRyan shared previous learning about body heat.  This helped us design two investigations we could do in class.  

Half of us investigated what would happen if we put an icepack in a place where it would not be exposed to any sunlight.  They decided the best place would be a locker, and placed the icepack in the locker for 20 minutes.  After 20 minutes, they took the icepack out the locker and discovered the ice had not melted much at all.  

The other half of us investigated what would happen if we held an icepack next to a human body.  Andrew decided to take one for our learning team and hold the icepack next to his leg.  He was wearing jeans and he thought he could do it.  (He later said it was an easy task.)  After 20 minutes, he took the icepack off of his leg and we were surprised to see how much it had melted.  (Mrs. Haney is kicking herself for forgetting to take pictures of the icepack.)

Andrew takes one for the team and holds an icepack on his leg.  

We kept checking in with him to see if he wanted one of us to 

take over.  He only let Mrs. Haney take over for a couple of minutes

while he stepped out of the room.  :)

After we were done we realized we had even more questions and planned some future investigations.  We will be synthesizing our learning with another science talk on Friday.  We will keep you posted!  In the meantime, we would love your comments, suggestions, or questions about our learning. Leave us a comment below.  

Analyzing our data from our Harkness Discussion.