The Making of a Scientist

I am a grade 5 teacher and have been working with a kindergarten teacher to enhance the learning of both classes. We have been teaching a variety of reading, writing, and technology skills through hands on buddy activities for the past ten years. We have previously worked with our students designing books through our school publishing center, power point presentations, and videos. We would like to extend the students technology learning by incorporating digital images into their science journals.

National Science Education Standard
Content Standard A
As a result of activities in grades k-4, all students should develop, an ability necessary to do scientific inquiry and understand about scientific inquiry.


National Standard: Students employ a wide range of strategies as they write and use different writing process elements appropriately to communicate with different audiences for a variety of purposes.

Students use spoken, written and visual language to accomplish their own purposes for learning, enjoyment, persuasion, and the exchange of information.

State of Connecticut Standard 3: Communicate with Others

Grade 5 Students produce written, oral and visual texts to express, develop and substantiate ideas and experiences.

Kindergarten grade students communicate through writing by taking part in the interactive writing process.

Inquiry Science Journals
Goal: Students will develop skills of observation, classification, measuring, recording data, making predictions, and drawing conclusions. These skills will be developed in the following units: buoyancy with floating and sinking, physics with flight and marble mazes, and chemistry with nutrition and their senses and ecosystems.

Through a series of hands on experiments buddies will explore physical life and Earth sciences and how it relates to them. During the inquiry process, fifth graders document buddy learning and their own learning through writing, discussion and digital photographs of their experiences. The focus of the journal is to document the students’ thinking, wondering and reasoning.