On the Hillbrook School campus in Los Gatos California several 3 dimensional cubes were built by faculty and staff out of PVC pipe and installed in various locations. Inspired by the “One Small Square” children’s non-fiction book series by Donald Silver, National Geographic Fellow Paul Salopek’s Out of Eden walk and the photographic work of David Liittschwager artfully shared in the book “A World in One Cubic Foot” this project blended the skills of real field biologists and making to engage students in authentic inquiry and documentation. This art, science and first grade homeroom collaboration turned the campus into an outdoor art museum and taught first grade students about techniques of real field biologists, empathy for animals species and their needs, and the importance of slow looking.

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During the summer of 2015, lower school science teacher Lara Blom, lower school homeroom teachers Laura Nielson, resident teacher Whitney Infelise and Barbara Johnson, technology integration specialist Kelly Scholten and lower school music teacher Kristin Engineer used a summer fellowship to design a new interdisciplinary unit for Hillbrook School first graders. This project evolved out several inspirations that were going on in the first grade at the same time including Project Zero philosophies on making student thinking visible and the science and art of David Liittschwager’s book “A World in One Cubic Foot.” Part one of this project was to build several cubes of various size ranging from two cubic meters to one cubic foot out of PVC pipe and install these geometric sculptures around the campus without any explanation. This installation was designed at first to spark student curiosity and give a sense of dimension and size.

“These cubes will eventually act as a metaphor for deep observation of the world, as well as an avenue for students to make inferences, make connections and ask meaningful questions,” explains Blom.

After initial engagement with the cubes in the form of open play and exploration was encouraged, lower school science teacher Lara Blom then extended the use of the cubes to focus on population of native species on the campus through a series of activities. Lara Blom presented her students with the question “How can we use a cube to observe what lives and moves through a space?” which led to discussions and various experiments to lure animals into the square to be documented. Students had to observe what needs campus animals had in order to design lures to get them into the cubes to be photographed. Students built wooden houses and nectar dispensers to install inside of the cubes and filled them with food they predicted would be of interest to native species. Once the lures were built by students, image capturing of the animals was left to technology integration specialist Kelly Scholten, who experimented with time-lapse cameras, iPad cameras and then finally settled on a trophy trail camera with a larger memory card and infrared motion detection.

Thanks to the more efficient capturing of images, students now had evidence of who occupied their cubes not only during the school day, but at night as well. Images captured were then organized by students in an open species categorization technique where students used their own ideas of how to classify the different kinds of animals they were noticing. Students noticed there were animals, that ran, flew, crawled. Animals that were small, medium and large and animals with fur, feathers and exoskeletons. After digging down about a foot into the dirt, students discovered and sorted the smallest life forms that occupied their cubes. Thanks to a parent who lent the class a powerful microscope, students were even able to see moving bacterium in their soil sample. After students were allowed to use their own ideas of how to categorized the different species they Explored a simple phylogenetic flowchart helping them sort their animals like scientists do, from living/non-living and kingdom to general phyla such as mammals. Experts were invited into the classroom to deepen their understanding of differences between “crawlers” such as insects, worms and millipedes. The Youth Science Institute brought living examples of Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches, Tarantulas and others into the classroom for added visualization of species differentiation. A bird expert came in to instruct on common bird species identification.

Documentation of student learning took place in various forms. Blom used a large portfolio to record the inventions students made for luring animals into the cube as well as general class observations and questions. Due to the range of student writing ability, students were asked to record their own ideas on iPads by vocally answering prompts inspired by Project Zero’s Visible Thinking routines, “I observe, I think, I wonder” about their daily work with the cubes. Finally, students also keep individual science notebooks where they keep their slow looking observational drawings, ideas about classification and other ponderings about their work. The culminating documentation that students will all contribute to is a student generated field guide to the animals found in their cube to be shared with the wider community.
The learning goals of this project included: Observation with set parameters, Question formation, Experimental Design, Animal lure design and building, Classification of species.