Art of Observation

I started off my classroom teaching in rural Eastern Oregon.  My students were rarely phobic of science, and they "did" nature and the outdoors, because of a lack of inside opportunities.  While teaching middle school science to my rural kids we continued a long standing tradition at the school of creating insect collections.  Yes, the ones with 50+ bugs pined to Styrofoam neatly categorized into scientific order.  Probably a project you vividly remember completing if you were asked to do so.

I was labeled by my rural students as an "Earth muffin" because I liked to play outside, not just do hard ranching or logging labor in the outdoors, but for fun and the beauty of it.  So, needless to say, I struggled with this project as I would inevitably have a few collections turned in with "not quite dead" bugs pined to the board by my procrastinators.  There were lots of benefits to the project though. My students benefited in gaining skills like time management, biodiversity, classification, using a dichotomous key, and the art of observation. 

You see, what my kids had to do, was look closely, look for a while, and look in a variety of places to meet the project requirements.  Once collections were brought it, students could compare and contrast the collection created with the location of the ranch where the bugs were collected.  They could look at the variety of insects in the same order.  They looked...and again...and in a different way....in a scientific way....in an artistic way...The questioned...tried something different....organized...

See, looking closely is not necessarily something most 7th graders get to do very often in their day to day life.  Now that I am teaching in Southern ssuburbia, my students are shuffling between school, endless baseball, football, soccer (insert a long list of sports that practice 5 days a week with a couple of games thrown in) or church, or theater, and a whole host of other very organized outcome oriented extra curricular activities. 

When my students in Oregon told me that they did not get to their homework it was because of calving season, or irrigation issues, or no electricity, but they were still observing life around them.  Here, my kids are busy with a whole host of other things, and they are fast moving things with lots of structure. 

How does this affect their ability though, to be scientifically literate?  Is fast thinking, seeing, producing, eating, being... the best?  Usually not.  With all of this said, it is now spring here (sort of) and it was time to teach about invertebrates in the South where there are an abundance of six legged creatures.  But, with quantity comes fear and scepticism, and thus I did not feel that I could sell my students (and their families) on a large scale insect collection.  But, I still felt that they needed to take the time to observe insects in the world around them.

I am fortunate that my school's campus has an outdoor classroom, of sorts, where I could take the kids out to collect one living bug, and then work through the dichotomous key to ID it.  After everyone correctly identified their bug they compared and contrasted and made observations about the entire classes collection.  Watching my students during this lab brought me immeasurable joy.  I watched macho boys frolic through the fields desperately trying to catch fluttering butterflies. 

The quote of the day though, was when one student proclaimed in frustration "I would have been so much better at this when I was 5!"  She was probably correct.  I feel as educators we must search out time and space for pure observation of the world.  If not, our students will lose the valuable innate skills they came to us with.

With all of that said, if this is something you would like to do with you students or your own children, I have created a detailed student friendly dichotomous key, and two different options for students to record and reflect about their insect and experience. 

Insect ID Dichotomous Key and Insect Observation Labs:  $5

The art of observation is the root of most great science. It is rare that we remember to take the time to let our students really take the time to look at the world around them in detail. The purpose of this lab is three fold. 1) I want students to look at a living specimen in detail and recognize it has particular features to help it fulfill its niche.
2) Students use a dichotomous key and practice using logic to classify living organisms.
3) I want them to be reflective in their work and either defend their answers or ask further questions about the process. This packet contains a student friendly dichotomous key and two varieties of labs that can be used with the key.

 

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Insect-ID-Dichotomous-Key-and-Insect-Observation-Labs