Science Super Star: Elizabeth Santos
We spotlight Elizabeth Santos, CRS Science Super Star honoree, who teaches at Grant Elementary in West Contra Costa. Elizabeth had her class explore the phenomena of pollination from mulitiple angles, utilizing various methods to engage all types of learners in her class.
April 20, 2020
We are thrilled to recognize Elizabeth Santos, 3rd Grade Teacher at Grant Elementary in West Contra Costa, as a 2020 Science Super Star!
Elizabeth integrates science in her classroom throughout the year. She reflected on a unit exploring the phenomenon of the pollination of flowers.
Before delving into the lesson, she led a class discussion to activate students’ prior knowledge about bees and flowers. To track their evolving ideas over time, Elizabeth used a KWL chart (what I Know, what I Wonder, what I Learned to record the students’ thinking before the experiments, in order to be able to revisit their ideas after the investigation and reflect on how their ideas changed as they gained more information.
To guide the investigation, Elizabeth posted two focus questions to the students: What is pollination? and How does it help a plant?
Elizabeth had her class attack the questions from multiple angles, using lessons, resources and strategies she had learned through CRS science professional development. She wants other teachers to know they can do the same. “My advice would be to make the most of resources in the community, like CRS, in understanding the standards, developing lessons, and developing our personal knowledge of different science areas.”
Elizabeth noted that having scientists come to visit her class and lead a lesson had a lasting impact on her students. She observed her students learning new ideas, using new vocabulary, and expressing their amazement at their discoveries: “Through BASIS, science comes to life as a real and fascinating discovery.”
One component of the investigation included watched a Mystery Science video to introduce a real-world example of a problem farmers in a community faced because vanilla bean plants were not producing pods. The students then sketched (and labeled!) the parts of a flower that involved in pollination. She had the students keep notes from class discussions, watching the video, and from their scientific readings, to use as evidence for their claims later on.
As the students gained confidence, Elizabeth introduced more hands-on activities. She had them create 3-D models of the pollination process between flowers and bees. Her students also dissected flowers, and assigned labels to the same parts they had drawn in their notebooks.
Elizabeth put her students’ new understanding to the test with an engineering challenge, where her students designed and engineered seeds that could float in both water and the air. They held trials and charted their results in their notebooks.
All the while, she made sure her students were making meaning out of the lessons. They continued their class discussions, and together, figured out how many bees would be needed to pollinate on orchard of tress (to strengthen their computational thinking.)
Between the oral presentations, and avid note taking, Elizabeth worked to reach language objectives to support development in both English and Spanish. When exploring the school garden, in search of pollinators and flowers, she had them question and comment using sentence structures “I observe ___” and “I wonder ___”.
Elizabeth and her students related what they learned to the “real world” by discussing the similarities between plants and animals. Both want to survive and reproduce. Plants are also essential to humans and the rest of the animal kingdom, as they help us meet our needs. Elizabeth also knows that science can help students in their daily lives, and is often a subject students find most relevant and approachable.
“I have a student with severe anxiety. Before BASIS came, he had such a difficult recess and was crying and extremely upset. I calmed him down and told him to stay for the special science class. He agreed with the understanding that if he didn’t feel better he could go to the office. Well, within a few minutes, he was smiling and fully engaged in the lesson. The lesson was so interesting that he immediately and completely forgot about his problems.”