Photograph by Kathy De La Torre

Alexandra Allmand (left) and Cody Kollman, examine live crayfish from their science project in Mary Patterson's third-grade class at Van Meter School.

Students' questions direct content in science program

Kits designed around inquiry teaching method

By Leigh Ann Maze

Mary Patterson's third-grade class at Van Meter School knows what food their classroom crayfish "Big Daddy" likes best. They know which snails have teeth, and which don't, and that a snail can travel across a football field and back in one night. They know because they were prompted to ask their own creative questions, and find their own answers, through a new hands-on science program that was implemented for the first time in Los Gatos Union School District classrooms this year.

The new science program, called the five-year science plan, is based on seven different "kits" for grades kindergarten thorough sixth, which contain all the materials and background information a teacher needs to conduct each lesson. The kits are designed around an inquiry-based method of learning, which encourages children to learn by asking questions rather than memorizing facts.

"It teaches children the value of generating their own questions. It also teaches them to be good observers, collectors of data, and to use that data to generate their own answers," said LGUSD assistant superintendent Suzanne Sanders.

Patterson's class is finishing up its "life systems kit," in which it spent three months exploring crayfish and snails and their habitats and behaviors.

"There is a lot of support for the inquiry-based method because of all the other life skills it teaches," said teacher Sandi Yellenberg. "It is more than just teaching facts."

Other kits included in the program feature insect, geology and earth, and space themes. While many schools in the district already use hands-on learning to teach science, the new program will integrate the hands-on philosophy with the core science curriculum.

The kits make teaching hands-on learning easier for teachers, because the various materials and information needed are already gathered together. Patterson's third-graders only had to add water and crayfish to their kits, which came with large, clear plastic tubs as habitats for the crayfish, and background information for the experiments.

The five-year science plan was presented to the LGUSD board of trustees, for the first time last spring by a group of parents, teachers and administrators, who had attended the Beckman Science Institute's week-long training. The group, made up of parents Dave Wilde and Jim Granger, teachers Sandi Yellenberg and Cathy Fisher and administrators Jim Silva and Suzanne Sanders, is known as the district's "science leadership team."

Yellenberg has taken a leadership role in implementing the new science program with the LGUSD curriculum, and recruited 14 teachers, like Mary Patterson, to pilot the program in their classrooms this year. The piloting teachers received their first training for the program at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose on Oct. 7.

Next year this group of teachers, with representatives from each school and grade level, will help to train other teachers until the program is districtwide.

While the LGUSD is aligned with the national science curriculum standards, the new science program will help the LGUSD become more closely aligned with new state science standards. The district also is in the midst of purchasing new science text books that are more closely aligned with the new standards and will enhance the new science program.

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