Science as a process: What is a science Circus?

Some of the things that I found very informational and useful in this chapter was how important a science circus really is. What a science circus is is a classroom filled with different activities at different stations that can enable the students to walk around to different stations where the students can observe and record their results from different experimental designs.
I think the science circus in the classroom is important because it allows students to use processes of scientific inquiry to develop knowledge and ideas about different scientific topics. Using inquiry results in identifying, interpreting data, and drawing conclusions, which is what students do in a science circus. I think that using a science circus in the classroom would really benefit students and help them expand on what they know about the scientific method.

An observation is different from an inference, although it is easy to mix the terms up. An observation is information that is gathered by using your five senses: for example, observing the weather. An inference is a statement you base on your observations, is usually a little more in depth and doesn't only involve using your senses but goes more in depth: for example, you can ask what happened to a particular object in nature, like why does the tree look the way it does?

In everyday life, we are always classifying things and we don't realize it. Classification of things occurs in groups based on similar properties: an example of this would be classifying books based on certain genres, or what many teenagers do is classify people based on stereotypes. Classification is always going on all the time in our heads and a lot of the time we don't realize that we're even doing it.

One very important thing to do in the classroom is to engage students in planning an investigation. This is important because the students need to learn how they are going to conduct an experiment and how they are going to get their results. Going beyond conducting an experiment, they need to do things like figure out what variables they are going to change, how they are going to record their results, and what variables they need to change compared to what variables they need as a control. This takes a lot of practice and the only way the students can practice this is to plan an experiment and practice it in the classroom. This is the time where students can apply the scientific method and all the procedures that they create and continue to practice them so they can practice the scientific methods, and not just talk about them.

If my classroom was given a video microscope to use for two weeks, there are so many things I would be interested in doing. One particular experiment that I would want to conduct is observing Daphnia under a microscope. Daphnia are just simply little creatures that you can find in pond water, some like to call them 'fleas in the water.' The reason why I would want to do this in my classroom is because I observed Daphnia recently in my biology lab and I thought it was very interesting to report. I think that this would be good to do in the classroom because it allows students to again use the process of the scientific method to make both observations and inferences about the topic that is being studied and then explore outside of things that are found in the classroom. Even as an activity to do before observing under the microscopes, the students can go outside by a pond and try to collect pond water samples that contain daphnia. This was a very successful experiment in my lab that I would love to share with my students!


 This is a picture of a daphnia that I would allow for my students to observe                
    under the microscopes!