Grade Level: 5th Grade

Teacher Name: Gustavo Soto

Artist Name: Gwendolyn Terry

Big Idea: Mixing

Inquiry Question: 

What does combining things together do? 

Shared with students - What does your relationship to your external world look like and why?

How did your team conceive your project? How was inquiry introduced to students and how did you integrate the inquiry process into your project?

  Due to the uncertainty at the begining of the school year, we wanted to be proactive and work with what we knew was happening, before the chaotic process of returning to in-class teaching, so we implemented our unit early. This was when Gustavo was going to focus on the  Modeling Matters unit so we placed our focus there. With the circumstances brought on from the Pandemic, we focused the art making on both their emotions and the science. We integrated inquiry into the process through looking at geological phenomena and asking how did it happen?  We then reflecting on the geological process' as metaphoric of their external relationships.  Community sharing and personal ownership of their choices were significant in the construction of their creations. Through this scientific, yet personal, investigative process, we engaged the students during the challenges of remote learning. 

From the initial proposal, to the midyear report, to the project conclusion, how did your team’s project change over the course of the school year? What motivated each change?

There was so much uncertainty with this school year about whether or not we'd see students in person. We wanted to get a project done so we decided to start our project earlier than we normally would. The most difficult aspect was getting materials to students. Once we began the project we realized that it would be better to share videos via Flipgrid to give students the background knowledge needed to connect the art to the the science. This was especially helpful for students who missed sessions with us. 

How did the project end? Considering the goals you set for yourselves in your proposal, did you achieve what your team sought out to do?

It was a mixed bag. The project ended successfully with over half of the class participating in the creation but without personal contact it was difficult to know if we'd made the artistic, abstract, metaphoric and allegorical connections to their science unit. It was important for all of us to be flexible and allow the interconnections between the art and science to form independently due to the remote learning and connections were made but perhaps not the ones we'd intended. 

Choose 1 standard that you worked on and discuss how the standard intersected with a part of your project.

Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)

Focal Performance Expectations:

5-PS1-4. Conduct an investigation to determine whether the mixing of two or more substances results in new substances.

We tried to connect what students were learning in science in our Modeling Matter unit to the art process. How molecules are attracted or repelled to other molecules students had to think about their relationships and how they fit into the world. 

What did you learn about your students and how they learned? What did you learn about the way you teach?

We learned that art was an avenue to help students better understand the science content being taught. The science concepts in this unit were particularly challenging for students because they had to imagine things on a nanoscale and without being able to be in person we were limited in providing hands-on investigations.