Summer SAVY Session 4, Day 1, Animal Adaptations (Gruchot)
Day 1: Hello SAVY Families!
The scientist in your family had an engaging, informative first day of SAVY Session 4: Animal Adaptations. Today, your scientists learned more about their role for this week. We started our class by positioning ourselves as scientists and discussing what it means to be a scientist. We talked about the steps we have to take and the safety measures that we must follow to ensure that we conduct valuable scientific explorations and experiments. Ask your scientist if they can tell you what scientists do and how we can maintain our integrity as scientists!
Next, we discussed change. As scientists, change is something that we will encounter and examine with every experiment that we do. Change is all around us. Your scientists were challenged to think about something that does NOT change, and we quickly realized that is very difficult! I was very impressed by some of their creative answers; scientists noted that the past, time, and gravity do not change.
One example of something that always changes is us! We are constantly changing. We examined our own lives so far to see how we have changed from when we were born, until today, and how we will continue to change in the future. Next, as a class, we came up with four generalizations of change: Change is everywhere, Change is related to time, Change can be natural or manmade, and Change may be random or predictable. We will use these four generalizations to analyze everything we do throughout our course.
Continuing on with the theme of change, we acted like scientists to examine changes in flowers. We looked at different flowers, made observations, wrote a hypothesis, and conducted an experiment. This is the process that a scientist must take every time they have a question they wish to answer. Next, we started looking at the changes that all living things go through–a life cycle. Tomorrow, we will start the day by looking at the life cycles of different animals!
Discussion questions for tonight: What does a scientist do? How did you act like a scientist today? Why is change important? How do we change? How do plants and animals change? Do you like change?
Your scientists blew me away with their knowledge and curiosity today. I look forward to working with them again tomorrow and throughout the rest of SAVY Session 4!
Sincerely,
Miss Gruchot 🙂