The following Professional Development sessions will be available from the Central Michigan GEMS Education Center.

FALL 2008 STUDENT WORKSHOPS AT CMU:

Friday, September 12:  In All Probability Grades 3-6  (1 – 3 p.m. @ Ronan 102) If your students groan at the mention of statistics, or go blank when you bring up probability, you might ask what they want to be when they grow up. Wall Street mogul? The next Freud? TV meteorologist? Well, there you go: they'll be using statistics and probability all the way up the ladder. This unit makes these subjects fun, and makes real-world connections students will use all their lives. Students dive into probability as they play games using coins, spinners, dice, and Native American game sticks. They investigate chance and probability with concrete materials, learn how to gather and analyze data, make predictions, and draw conclusions. As they gain direct experience, they also build confidence in their ability to explore probability and statistics. The guide provides background information on these themes, with information on real-life connections and careers. The activities provide a solid basis for the development of much-needed (and often neglected) real-life understandings and skills, stressing cooperation along the way.

Saturday, October 4:  Project Wild, Aquatic Wild  Grades K-12 (8:30 am. – 4:00 p.m. @ Finch 114) The activities found in Project WILD instructional materials are intended for use in both classroom and informal settings.  The instructional materials are designed to support state and national academic standards appropriate for grades K-12.  The activities can easily be adapted to meet the learning requirements for academic disciplines ranging from science and environmental education to social studies, math, and language arts.  Educators may choose one or more Project WILD activities to teach a concept or skill.  The activities may be integrated into existing courses of study, or an entire set of activities may serve effectively as the basis for a specific course.

Friday, October 24:  Tree Homes Grades Preschool-2 (1:00 – 3:00 p.m. @ Ronan 102) Tree Homes encourages appreciation for trees and for the animals that live in tree homes. The unit is designed to stimulate children's interest in the world around them and in the biological need for warmth and shelter. It introduces different parenting and nesting strategies, and compares the characteristics and behaviors of various tree-home animals. In six main activities, students become familiar with a living tree and then build a child-size tree from cardboard boxes, paper, and cardboard tubes. They make paper models of raccoons and owls, and the class role-plays tree-home dramas about raccoons, a mother bear and her cubs, and a family of owls. Math concepts of sorting/classifying and measurement are emphasized throughout.

Saturday, November 8:  CSI Theme (9:00 a.m – 4:00 p.m. @ Ronan 102) Mystery Festival uses a classroom learning-station format; students study the "crime scene," then conduct crime-lab tests on the evidence, analyze the results, and try to solve the mystery. These forensic science activities absorb students from the start and keep them intensely involved throughout. This unit explores many key content areas and emphasizes the important distinction between evidence and inference. The many crime-lab procedures include thread tests, powder tests, DNA comparison, chromatography, and fingerprinting. Mystery Festival combines fun and excitement with careful experimentation, logical thinking, and real-life connections to forensic science. As the fascinating correlation between science and detective work become clear, students absorb processes that will be useful in all disciplines. Crime Lab Chemistry: This all new, updated version of the classic GEMS best seller has been significantly enhanced, with new sessions and added background for the teacher. In this unit's prime scenario, pegging the pen used to write a ransom note comes down to chromatography, a technique for separating mixtures into their (telling) component parts. Poirot never had it this good. This New GEMS rewrite starts with the classic sessions from the original guide: Challenged to determine which of several black pens was used to write a ransom note, student-detectives explore the concepts of solubility, pigments, and separation of mixtures as they use chromatography to ferret out the culprit. New sessions provide multiple opportunities for students to visualize the molecular nature and behavior of matter, as they create and revise models and consider the advantages and limitations of models. Ink is one of many substances for which chromatography is used in science; the separation of blood and other constituents has become invaluable in real-world forensic science, and students' fascination with detective work makes a terrific springboard for further discussion. Several mystery scenarios are possible, using nefarious characters drawn from any context you like; many teachers have cast themselves or the school principal as suspects!

SPRING 2009 STUDENT WORKSHOPS AT CMU:

Friday, January 23: Frog Math (Grades K-3); 1-4pm This engaging, creative unit has been endorsed by mathematics educators nationwide for its application of guided-discovery methods through cooperative, interdisciplinary activities. In an artful interweaving of mathematics and literature, this lively series jumps off from one of the well-known Frog and Toad are Friends stories, "The Lost Button." The story leads to free exploration of buttons, then sorting and classifying and a game of Guess the Sort. Students design their own buttons and use a graphing grid to organize data.

Saturday, February 7: Project WET/Project Learning Tree; 8:30am - 4:00pm (Finch 114) Project WET (Water Education for Teachers) is an award-winning, nonprofit water education curriculum. The program facilitates and promotes awareness, appreciation, knowledge, and stewardship of water resources through the dissemination of classroom-ready teaching aids and the establishment of internationally sponsored Project WET programs. Project Learning Tree® is an award winning, multi-disciplinary environmental education program for educators and students in PreK-grade 12. PLT, a program of the American Forest Foundation, is one of the most widely used environmental education programs in the United States and abroad. PLT continues to set the standard for environmental education excellence. PLT helps students learn how to think, not what to think, about the environment. PLT meets state and national education standards. The curriculum materials provide the tools educators need to bring the environment into the classroom and their students into the environment. Topics range from forests, wildlife, and water, to community planning, waste management and energy.

Friday, February 27: Electric Circuits: Inventive Physical Science Activities (Grades 3-6); 1-4pm This guide provides a safe, active, and engaging introduction to electricity and electric circuits. The activities spark creativity as students invent their own electrical gadgets, using inexpensive and readily available materials, such as plastic film canisters and holiday lights. The unit opens as students investigate an array of clever electrical devices, first exploring their functions, then learning how their circuits work. The contributions of famous inventors, as well as child inventors, are highlighted.

Friday, March 27: Environmental Detectives (Grades 5-8); 1-4pmThis substantial unit for grades 5–8 takes the mystery "hook," used so successfully in other GEMS units like the very popular Mystery Festival, to engage students in exploring a range of crucial environmental issues. 

In this case, the "crime" is a mysterious environmental calamity—a fish die-off that began five years ago. The scene of the crime is the "Gray Area," a watershed that includes forests, a city, a town, a coast, three rivers, a lake, and a pond. Student sleuths investigate the many potential causes of the fish dying, including chlorine pollution, acid rain, erosion and sediment pollution, predator-prey relationships, phosphate pollution and algal blooms, and oil pollution. 

Environmental Detectives provides students the opportunity to grapple with a complex, interdisciplinary scientific problem. They hear statements of various "suspects" in the crime. They study and discuss reference materials, including records, newspaper articles, charts, graphs, and even "secret documents," and integrate all of this information with their own test results.

Friday, April 17: Secret Formulas (Grades 1-3); 1-4pm If you wanted to find a "secret formula" to produce a guide that contained wildly popular, sweet, and tasty activities solidly packed with math and science, you'd have it in Secret Formulas! Students eagerly investigate the properties of substances as they make their own personal brands of paste, toothpaste, cola, and ice cream. The activities have been carefully designed to convey key science/mathematics skills and concepts, provide highly motivating real-life experiences with chemistry, and build student understanding of cause and effect, central to later understanding of controlled experimentation. Secret Formulas speaks to the need expressed by many primary school teachers for more hands-on physical science activities.

GEMS Associates Training, Seeds of Science, Roots of Reading Cohort, This commitment is in Spring 2009. We will be accepting teams of teachers in grades 2-5. For more information on this professional development opportunity, go to http://seedsofscience.org/ (the curriculum link on the website also has more info). Applications are not being accepted at this time.