February 2012 This Month’s Activities
Our Superspark: This month’s SuperSpark™ is about asking interesting questions based on what we see in the world around us, designing a good experiment, and graphing data from that experiment, all based on some recently published research on animal behavior: the apparent ability of a parrot to keep the beat. Previously, most scientists thought that humans were the only species with a sense of rhythm. Take a look at the data and decide for yourself.
This SuperSpark addresses the following learning standards:
- Analyzing and interpreting the results of scientific investigations (data analysis)
- Presenting data in graphical form
- Communicating the results of scientific investigations using figures and tables
- Applying the results of scientific investigations
- Identifying further questions raised by the results of scientific investigations
Our MiniSpark: You can apply scientific thinking to just about anything, even breakfast!
This month’s MiniSpark gives students a chance to solve an interesting problem associated with eating in a hurry. See where it leads!
Our Science Around You talks about the ability of animals to communicate with each other, both within species and between species, and provides a number of interesting web links for further investigation of the topic.
And don’t forget to check out and comment on this month’s Blog, about “Explaining to Learn” Read it here.
The Daily Tweet: To go along with this month’s SuperSpark about bird behavior, every weekday this month we’ll be posting a new tweet about the biology of birds. Some of these tweets were written by my son Oliver, who knows a lot more about birds than I do! Follow us on Twitter, or just visit this website every day (the Daily Tweet is posted under New This Month)
©2012 SciSpark.com
