A middle school teacher explains her inquiry-based environmental science curriculum, then a student describes growing strawberries with different growth hormone levels to find the most efficient amount for yield. The class links small experiments to real agricultural problems.
I teach middle school science because science is my passion, and I get to share that passion with them. As they go through 8th grade environmental science, we are addressing very real issues both locally and globally, and we are also exploring solutions. They're doing inquiry labs in the classroom. They're learning how to take action, to be proactive. They can take part in this process, not only understanding our environmental problems but actually testing solutions. for them and certainly helping shape our world.
This is the crop lab. Everybody in the grade gets a group, and my grade— my group is growing strawberries. And so what we're doing is we're comparing. We bought growth hormone, and we're putting growth hormone in 2 out of the 3 of them to see what the difference is in how they grow. So there's a little bit of growth hormone in this, and then extra growth hormone in this, and none in here. We figure out which one grows the best, and then we harvest the strawberries. We've been studying in class yield and how plants grow and how that helps the world. And so we wanted to figure out how we could make that more efficient. And doing that on a smaller scale helps us go out into the world and do it on a larger scale.
