Citizen Science

One of the most significant things that I have done as a science teacher is implement a citizen science lesson. If you have never done a citizen science lesson in your classroom, I highly recommend it. I had a special opportunity when implementing my lesson, but there are SO many lessons out there to choose from that you could find to fit perfectly into your classroom.

I had the opportunity to be a part of the Kenan Fellows in the 14-15 Cohort in North Carolina. I was able to work with a mentor at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences to study Demodex Mites (mites that live on us!) ...yes...100% of us! As a Kenan Fellow, me and "team mite" had to create a curriculum from our experiences and then implement them into our classroom. Creating the curriculum was the most challenging task that I faced during the Kenan Fellows program, but at the same time, it was one of the most exciting! One of the challenges me and another team member faced was fitting the Demodex mites experiment into the 7th grade curriculum. It fit well into the 8th grade curriculum, but 7th grade was a stretch. It worked nicely while teaching scientific inquiry, which is the direction that we went in; however, science inquiry isn’t tested in 7th grade, which can cause issues with pacing. 

The most exciting thing of all was implementing the curriculum!! I truly built up the mite lab that we were going to do in class. I implemented my curriculum at the beginning of the year, so I barely knew my students. This was a wonderful introduction to my science classroom, and my students had a ball. We have the results of their question, “Do Middle School Students Have Mites?”. My mentor and other researchers know that these mites are on 100% of adults, but they do not know much else. As a class, by students swabbed each others faces to hopefully get mite DNA. We sent the swabs back to my mentor so he could analyze the data. My students were able to do REAL science in REAL time. The data was very valuable to my mentor. The students were also super into the lesson. They asked almost everyday over the year, "Do we have mites?", and we found out...they did! Not all of the tubes showed mite data, but this brought up more questions and conversations. Science never ends!

If you are interested in looking at other citizen science projects for your classroom, here is a link to an awesome site with many resources! SciStarter