Science Notebooks

The students in first grade are working in Science Notebooks as an extension of our existing Science kit curriculum.  During each investigation students are involved in some form of data collection.  Data collection can be a graphic organizer, a drawing, a chart or table, a graph, or observation notes, etc.  For the lesson on sifting, the data collection was a sample of three types of river rock they separated using screens. 
On the day following the lesson, students re-visit their data sheet and draw conclusions about the experiment in writing.

Here is a picture of one of our binders open to a data collection page with the writing on the opposite page:

The students discussed what they noticed about the samples.  One student noticed that the glue made the sand turn hard into a rock.  This led us in a discussion on sedimentary rock formations.  Students used magnifying glasses to look more closely at the samples.  One student made the comment  "But Mrs. McAuliffe... I don't see anything... just smaller rocks."  Exactly!!!  I couldn't have said it better myself.  This was the point of our lesson.  Sand and gravel are smaller versions of the pebbles in our sample because they all came from the same river bed and broke up over time.  Don't you just love first graders???  They "rock"!