Transcription
We are working with the OpenSciEd curriculum. This unit is Earth's Resources and Human Impact. They today were introduced to a phenomenon, droughts and floods, and what might be causing droughts and floods. And I wanted to make sure that they understood that this was a complex phenomenon. This problem that they were going to try to solve was pretty difficult, and they don't have anything really at this point to be able to do that. So what I want to make sure of is that students are asking questions that they have. All students have an opportunity to participate in the discourse. We begin with a Notice and Wondering where all students can notice something and wonder about something so they all feel comfortable and removes that barrier.
Now, as you look through and watch this video, I want you to think about in this Notice and Wonders that we're doing, quotes, things that you notice that people are saying. I want you to look just at not what they are doing, but look at the scenes, look at the backgrounds. I want you to notice their thoughts and their feelings. Here we go.
California is still dealing with its worst drought in 1200 years. Many people there are being told to conserve water wherever and however they can. The situation though is even worse for residents in one particular town who are now living without any water at all. And I ran out of water since mid-July. It all started last year when this house ran out of water. Then Yolanda's, and then this house. Yolanda's son is filling the shower bucket. It's a sponge bath every day. We warm up the water on the stove and I pour it on the orange bucket there. Those pumps keep coming. They can't move. Who's going to buy a house with no water and it's $12,000 to dig a deeper well. Whoever has water here in this neighborhood has the jackpot. For today, Dave Maloff in California's Central Valley.
Okay, fill in your Notice and your Wonders. Let me see at least three wonders there. What do you not hear them saying? What do you wonder about how that might have happened? What do you notice about their feelings? Let's share out a little bit. What do you notice? What did you notice about what's going on in Porterville, California? What's happening there? I noticed that like, to use the bathroom and shower, they had to like fill buckets with water sometimes from their neighbors. Fill buckets from the neighbors you said? The churches are giving out free hot showers. Ah! Free hot showers at the church. I noticed that it wasn't like everybody started to lose water. Like over time different houses started to like loose water. Say more, what do you mean by not everybody? It was like one by one. Okay. Yeah. Some houses still manage to have water in them. Yeah, some still have the water, yeah. The people seem like mentally tired, like some because they can't like use the toilet without like having to go to a neighbor's house. Yeah, it's a lot of work. Let's go on to some of our wonders guys. I wonder about This is really something. Yeah. How long has, like, have they not had any water? How long? Is this affecting their health negatively? Oh, is this affecting their health? You guys have lots of questions today. And one last one. Why did it stop raining? If it would just rain you mean they'd be okay? You think? Okay, we'll have to investigate that.
So let's take a look at one more that I found for you. I want you to label it Vicksburg, Mississippi. And again, notice what they're thinking. How are they feeling? What's the scene behind that you're looking at? In the King's community of North Vicksburg, Mississippi, friends and relatives are helping Joanne Parks pack up her worldly possessions. The flood waters in the area have risen a half meter in the last 24 hours, and there is fear they could reach her house within the next week. This is one of the higher areas here in the Kings community. And, you know, like myself and a lot of others, we have homeowners' insurance, but we don't have flood insurance because we have never been required to have it because it's not a flood area. In Vicksburg, the waters are currently sixteen meters above flood stage. I've never seen the river as high as it is right now. And I hope I never see it get this high again because it's hurting a lot of folks around here and a lot of businesses.
Okay, fill in your Notice and Wonders. What do you notice here? What's going on in Vicksburg? What's it like for the people living there? Yeah. The water's higher than it's ever been. Water higher than it's ever been. Seventy years you said? Okay, what else did you notice? People weren't prepared for the floods. People aren't prepared. They lived in an industrial area. Lived in an industrial area. It's not a flood area. It's not a flood area. Yeah, she said that right? And can anybody add onto that what she said about it not being a flood area? There's no flood insurance. And she didn't have flood insurance. What is flood insurance? Does anybody ? If you have floods like they get, it gets paid for. So they have to pay for the insurance and that helps them, okay. Because they barely had floods so they didn't think they'd need it. Wow! Anybody more notices? Yeah. They're scared to go to sleep at night. Deandre, you had your hand up? Half a meter has already come at their house in just 24 hours. This is your meter. So in 24 hours they had that much water going to the house? That's a lot of water. Let's do some Wonders. What'd you wonder about, Dylan? Did the rain cause this? Did the rain cause it? Okay, another wonder. How was it when they noticed it might be a problem? Another one. There's no school. Do they have school? In both cases, right? Drought and the flood? What would you feel like if we experienced one of these. For example, like we ran outta water. Sad. That's good. I'd be kind of annoyed having to fill buckets with water every day to shower. That'd be tough, wouldn't it? Yeah, flush a toilet, you go get some water. How else would it change your daily life? Oh, electricity. Probably wouldn't have access to electricity. How about if we flooded? I'd be scared because I don't know how to swim.
We begin with a Notice and Wondering where all students can notice something and wonder about something so they all feel comfortable and removes that barrier. When I'm going to have a particular conversation in that if it's going to be a whole group or a small group conversation, what are those bought back pocket questions that I'm going to need? What am I going to need to prepare for what they might say? I don't want to give these students the answers. I want them to try to figure them out on their own. And if some of them get a little bit beyond and are thinking a little bit deeper at this point, which is at the beginning of a unit, I want to make sure I have some way that I can say, okay, well how might we do that? So I have a big group of headlines. Some of these headlines are about droughts, and some of these headlines are about floods. Your job today when I put you at the lab groups is to divide them up. Half of you take the drought to begin with. Half of you take the floods. And you're going to look for some patterns. You're going to look for some trends. Individually read these headlines first. Then discuss with your small group any kind of similarity, any kind of similar headlines you see, and label the patterns that you're seeing on a sticky note. You're going to look for what kind of patterns, what kind of trends do they all seem to say the same things? Are the same kind of words in all of these headlines?
What I noticed with these green ones here, one talks about floods, all of them are talking about like the temperature, like it says higher temperature here. It says rising temperature. It says it's hot. It's like all talking about temperatures. Oh, that's kind of weird because, right, temperatures with floods. Shouldn't that be ? I thought like droughts be a thing. Yeah, because like water. What did you notice so far? I noticed that some of these actually kind of like seem like they go together and they like match up with what they're both saying. Say more. Like, this one's talking about, I always knew normal consists of worsening floods. Extreme floods may be the new normal. What might that mean? That might mean that it's happening more often. Okay, and how would we figure out if that's actually happening more often? We could like research and like look at like the wonder patterns and stuff. Like in from before? Yeah. What did you notice on there? You have here, what have you noticed that you see? That you not? Like most of the cords are from like 2019 and 2020 with only a few being like 2016 or something. Okay. And like they use a lot of the same words like hot, dry, and like temperature. So they're using that. You'll see you've got that hot, heat, dry. Okay. New normal. Oh, you have new normal. They got new normal over here too.
When they went into their groupings, they all had headlines to look at for droughts and for floods. And as I approached each one, I had to make sure that I had some back pocket questions that I was prepared to ask them and to kind of probe their learning. What does it mean to have a flash flood? I'm not sure myself. What do you think? I mean, we can look it up later. We can really find that out. That happens like quickly. It happens quickly. So like without notice? Yeah. So we have warmer temperatures here and we have warmer temperatures here. Mm-hmm. And they both cause the same thing? And we have new normal here and new normal there? That's interesting. How are we going to figure that out? Research? Research? What kind of data do you think we're going to need? Let's see, what else can we say? I think we did all of them. They always talk about heat. They talk about a lot heat. You said it's all about the heat. Yeah. So let's do them both. I think it depends where you are, like where they are. How does that happen? Because like some places are wet, like wetter, and then some places are drier. So like maybe the heat's worse in some places and less in others. So you think the amount of heat has a lot to do with it? Yeah. We need to figure that out, don't we? Yeah.
Let me have your attention. You are going to take your sticky notes and we're going to put our patterns up on the chart paper. On the left, those are the patterns you noticed across drought related headlines and on the right patterns, you notice the lot cross flood. One person from each group take the drought and one person take the flood related headlines. [Students speaking] All right, come on over. Let's discuss. Come on, everybody go over. Find a place where you can see me. You all are going to be able to see. Let's talk about it. Tell me what we found. Like during droughts and floods, it's warm weather. Droughts can cause like war temperature and cause the wildfires. What else do the headlines teach us? In the floods the temperature can rise even though like is a lot of water? Anybody else want to add to that?
In this OpenSciEd classroom, and any classroom, I think talk really matters. Science talk matters. Students need to discuss what's going on and what their thinking is so that they can also hear themselves and then they can hear each other and hear the different perspectives. You're going to do some Home Learning today, you are going to talk to your members of your family. I want you to figure out, has our community ever had anything like this happen before? And lastly, have you or a member of your family ever had lived in an area that was flooded or experienced a drought? So come back with stories about floods and droughts. I really think Deeper Learning is throwing out something to them that is of a real world. It means something to them and it makes them want to figure that out. And they don't know the science behind it at that point. So I really think Deeper Learning is giving them opportunities to figure stuff out on their own. And what really matters there is that the students are leading that instruction and no longer am I giving them answers and feeding them vocabulary, I'm asking them to discover that and then to become a community so that they can move their science speaking forward together.