Reflecting on the Past to Improve the Future

While answering discussion questions online for my paperless Science Methods for Childhood Education course, I started to think about a Science lesson I distinctly remember from my fifth grade class when I was in elementary school. 

My Science Methods class was posed with this question:  As part of her class’s exploration of atoms, Ms. Murray has the students work with “mystery boxes” containing everyday objects. Did you ever have a science lesson in which you had to try to identify or describe something you couldn’t see? In what ways does this kind of lesson build students’ scientific skills?
I never had the opportunity to partake in a Science lesson that used a mystery box but I do vividly remember working with a mystery mixture.  My fifth grade Science teacher was teaching us how to make observations, predictions and hypothesis.  She created mixtures in Dixie cups for each student that contained water and babypowder.  She made it a point not to tell us was the mixture consisted of because she wanted us to create our own predictions from our oberservations.  We used the three out of the five senses (sight, smell and touch) to determine what this mixture was made of.  We learned that the safest way to smell something that we were unsure of its make-up was to "woft" the smell.  The class also learned the importance to never taste or digest a material we were unsure of incase it was poisonous. 

We started fieldwork today, and the fifth grade class we are working with is learning about mixtures.  I could definitely use this experiment in my lesson plan I am going to create to teach the students about experimenting and dealing with unknown mixtures.

This is definitely an idea for a lesson that I could use in my future classroom to teach about observations.  Thinking back on a lesson that has left an impression on my life professionally is something that I will carry with me throughout my journey at becoming an elementary educator.

This lesson also ties in with our previous week's main topic, which was messyness.  The title to this person's blog seems as though the experiment did not go as planned, but the children had fun and learned new things anyways.  Here is a link to someone's Tumblr page I found who did a similar experiment with a young boy.  They posted pictures of the babypowder and water creation and their observations, pretty cool stuff!!