Upper School Students 'Do' Science

Upper school students at GUS “do” science the way adventurers tackle Mt. Everest. They are active participants, indeed, explorers intent on discovery.

They begin and end under the guidance of Jo Slavitz, their teacher in sixth and eighth grade. Slavitz arrived at GUS in 2012 after a year at Nashoba Brooks and five years at Nantucket New School, all spent teaching middle school science and math. She began her career with Teach for America in the Rio Grande Valley in southern Texas where she found her love for middle school students. “Middle school is a magical time,” she says. “There are so many changes. I love the people I get to spend my days with! They grow so much in three short years.”

Slavitz’s goal is to “interlock” the science curriculum with the year’s theme, “giving the students a sense of place and hands-on experience.” In sixth grade, the theme is “The People.” Students study astronomy and design and engineer robotic Mars Rovers out of Lego systems. After researching NASA’s Mars Rovers, they build their own to achieve specific tasks such as seeking water, taking rock samples, or shooting photographs. “It’s frustrating,” explains Slavitz. “Many times, it doesn’t work as they’d hoped, but it helps them problem solve and learn that things don’t always work as you’d like them to the first time.”

The eighth graders have similar experiences building Rube Goldberg machines, applying skills they have acquired through their study of physics and Newton’s laws about motion. In other words, they design complex machines to achieve simple tasks. Last year, it was a device to pop balloons that had to go through five different energy transformations including cascading dominoes, rolling cars, and skateboards careening down ramps, before the balloons would pop.

When the class studies the conservation of mass, students start by weighing salt and water. Then they move on to copper and sulfur. They observe that the mass doesn’t change. Multiple experiences demonstrate the same concept but in more complex ways as the students progress. Consequently,

“the students are able to design in their heads the laws and principles themselves,” says Slavitz. “The kids go through processes to reach scientific principles themselves rather than being told the principles and then doing experiments that prove them,” explains Slavitz. Clearly, the curriculum is hands on, with the emphasis on self-discovery. This is the inverse of how science is often taught, according to Slavitz, “but this is the way science should be taught.”

Slavitz believes the GUS campus lends itself well to hands-on science curriculum. “Our campus is an incredible location. To be able to have the nature trail, multiple ponds, the ocean two minutes away, a greenhouse—you have the whole world to explore. GUS was founded with the idea that children should get outside and explore the world. Any school can have beakers and scales and basic lab equipment— and we have those things and we use them—but we also have so much more. Science is an extension of play. It’s so much fun to see the students explore and discover and get excited about science on their own and in real time.”

Upper school students also participate in citizen science projects, a way to be a part of professional research projects by submitting their data to scientific pools. For example, sixth graders are tagging and identifying Monarch butterflies grown in the first grade classroom before they migrate south through a program called Monarch Watch. They then log by computer into an international database with date and information. If a butterfly is then found anywhere else, there will be information about where it migrated and how long it lived. Students

also participated in Oceans 180, a project which allowed them to judge video abstracts made by ocean scientists summarizing the results of a recently published, peerreviewed study. “For kids to participate in actual scientific projects and experiments is very empowering,” explains Slavitz. “They don’t have to ask, when am I going to use this? They are using it now.”

“When they leave GUS, the students will have all the content of a good science background but more importantly, the confidence and ability to write a good expository lab report or scientific paper, set up complex lab equipment, and the curiosity to question, explore, and discover. What sets them apart is that they are confident and skilled scientific doers.”

Emilie Cushing teaches the seventh graders that come in-between the bookends of Slavitz’s sixth and eighth graders. Cushing has been at GUS since 2001, except for a five-year hiatus to raise her two young daughters. Her experience before GUS was outdoor teaching on a farm, at the Seacoast Science Center, and at the Ipswich River Wildlife Sanctuary. With a BA in Wildlife Science and an MS in Environmental Studies, only a school like GUS that emphasizes the importance of getting outdoors to learn could have lured Cushing inside.

Working with the seventh grade theme of “Who am I?,” Cushing’s goal is to “have the students understand how the systems in their bodies work and how they, as humans, fit into the entire ecosystem which includes plants, other animals, and things that aren’t living.” For example, the students look at who they are in relation to

the greater food system and what similarities and differences they have with plants. When they learn how similar the reproductive system in plants is to the human system, it becomes easier to talk about human sexual reproduction without embarrassment, Cushing finds. “Before we do the reproductive system, we do a flower dissection,” Cushing explains. “They see that the flower’s parts correspond to human parts

and that flowering plants, too, use sexual reproduction to reproduce. It helps to be able to say ovary first when you are talking about a flower! And it is instructive to be able to compare the two systems.” Growing beans in the school’s greenhouse and then doing experiments about light energy, the students learn how plants are different from animals. “Plants make their own food through photosynthesis, while humans must consume food to provide their bodies with energy.” And, yes, this is part of the spiraling curriculum from first grade when they studied life cycles at a more simplistic level.

As in sixth and eighth grade science, much of the learning in seventh happens through hands-on

activities. Students create models of how lungs work, observe and sketch a sheep’s brain because it is similar to that of a human, and design experiments to test hypotheses. Last winter, they engaged in experiments to answer questions about viruses and bacteria, first looking around the school to decide where the most bacteria might grow, concluding that the computer cart and bathroom door handles might be the worst offenders. They took Q-tips, swiped a variety of locations, put their samples in petri dishes filled with agar, a medium that encourages the growth of bacteria, taped up the dishes, and put them in a warm place to wait for bacteria colonies to start growing. Once the bacteria grew, the students compared results from the locations where they took swipes and considered the validity of their original hypotheses.

An exciting initiative this year will partner seventh graders with Harvard Forest in Petersham, Massachusetts, on a project to collect data that will be used to determine how trees change over time. Cushing has cordoned off a 10x10-meter area on the Glen Urquhart property and the seventh graders have done their baseline measurements of the trees within the designated area. Next year, Cushing will cordon off another 10x10 plot, so that every seventh grader has the opportunity to take measurements and data since Harvard only wants data on each area every other year. The students will measure the diameters of the trees at the same height (DBH—diameter at breast height) and record signs of human disturbance on the ground. They will send their data to Harvard. “This is a good way to teach the importance of accurate data collection,” explains Cushing. “Harvard would like all of this information but finding people to monitor all this area is costly and difficult. Having students do the work is very cost effective for Harvard and lets the students do important, relevant work at a very young age.”

Like Slavitz, Cushing loves working with middle schoolers. “I like their sense of humor and their willingness and excitement to take risks. I like how they value their individuality. When I say that out loud, I feel like that does not describe middle schoolers, but I feel it is true of Glen Urquhart. Perhaps that is unique to our students.”