Today was our first day of the Mentos Experiment (which you can find at my TPT store - I'll put the link at the bottom just in case you want to check it out)! I thought I would show you some examples of my teacher journal:You can see that I wrote the focus question, the Prediction (P in the triangle) sentence frame, and then drew an example of my observation.
Now, let's look at what the students did.
I hope you can read this...I am currently having a love/hate relationship with my scanner and the Internet. She copied the focus question and then wrote her own prediction:
"I think that the mento will sink and dissolve over a few days. When a teacher drops the mento in the diet coke I think it will fizz then sink."
She had obviously seen the experiment before!
Next look at her observations. First you can tell she put a lot more detail in the pictures than I did. The man next to the soda is my colleague who is about six feet something and the kids used him as our measurement. Was it taller than him?
Her written observation stated:
"I observed that...
1. When the diet coke erupted that it was a light brown.
2. Before it erupted it fizzed up then the fizz erupted first.
3. After the eruption it smelled like a candle to me.
4. During the eruption at the top of the erupting soda it sort of flattened and then fell to the ground."
Needless to say...I am pleasantly pleased with the way our class journal helped her format her own journal entry without it being a "cookie cutter" fill in the blank approach to science.
Any thoughts out there? If you want to see the whole unit, it is available for $5 at my store: http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Kicking-Off-the-Year-with-a-Mentos-Investigation
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