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Home : 2002 : January : 9
In my former life, I was a medical technologist and specialized in microbiology. I'm not sure what would be appropriate for that age, but here are a few ideas.
A paper doll cutout is labeled with her birth order place in her family -- 20th of 22 children. Clip art calendar was labled with her birth and death dates. A baby scale clip art was labeled with her birth weight. A cut out in the shape of Tennessee was labeled Clarksville for where she was born. All of this was glued to the running shoe clipart blown up to the size of a piece of typing paper. Each child was asked to fill out a questionaire -- What is our birth date? Where were you born? How much did you weigh at birth? When were you born? What childhood diseases have you had? What are your goals right now? They also had questionaires for two people older than they like parents and grandparents. We then made glyphs for them. By looking at the glyps it is obvious that something has happened in health care because the number of childhood diseases decreases among the younger people. Even third graders figured out it was the shots they had to take. THe glyphs can be used for graphing real data. I got the idea from a book called Feisty Females. Another idea is to get your hands dirty and rub them on a slice of raw baking potato. Place the potato in a plastic zip lock bag. Wash your hands. Repeat. Place the bags in dark warm places and see what grows on the potato slices. Jello made with less water makes an agar like substance that also will grow organisms. To demonstrate how germs are easily passed from person to person. Have several bowls of glitter available. Have students divided into groups. Each group places their hands down into one color of gliter. Glitter will stick to their hands. Then have students shake hands with several people in other groups. Their hands will now have many different colors of glitter. Pasteur's Fight Against Microbes is a short bio of Pasteur that can be read aloud and gives good historical background. From this book you could try fermenting some apple juice. While fermentation is technically done with yeasts (a fungus)and not bacteria or viruses you could make the unit on microbes to encompass yeast also. Yeast can easily be studied by this age group. You can see how they cause bread to rise. How they react and how hot water kills them. I think Red Star yeast has a good teacher's guide. We study yeast when we make pizza dough for our pizza pie day. We have a real fun day where we learn lots. I have to go to class tonight so I can't post any more ideas right now, but I will try to get back to you with some simple experiments. Lori 2
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