The First Few Weeks...

The first several weeks of school are always an interesting and busy time.  Starting the year off, I hope to give my students a really strong background about what science means and how it is done, and also what the branch of science called biology is all about.  We spent several days talking about the scientific process- about how science in the real world is not always like the "scientific method" steps we sometimes learn in school: question, hypothesis, experiment, conclusion- bam! done!  We talked about how the scientific process is more of a circular process- the stages of the scientific method are all there, but scientists may flow back and forth from one stage to another- the arrows showing the flow of the process don't just proceed in one direction, in other words!  We talked about some real life examples of how the scientific process has worked this way- from experiments about what caused a mass extinction, to those that determined that CFCs were destroying our ozone layer, to the discovery of DNA's structure.  

Following this, we are beginning the important task of trying to figure out just what "biology" is.  We now know that biology is defined as the study of life, but we are starting to realize that defining "life" isn't always so easily done!  It might be hard for some to accept, but maybe "life" or "living" is one of those terms that has a slightly different definition depending on who you ask to define it.  We developed a list of characteristics shared by living things, but realized that there are some times that this list may not be adequate to define what is living or not!

Biology students try to define life and categorize objects as living or non-living!

Another thing students have been hard at work on is learning a list of science-related prefixes and suffixes.  I hope that the knowledge of the definitions of these words will help throughout the year as students have to learn science vocabulary that sometimes seems like its own different language!  We started off with the word "pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis," which may be a bit of an extreme example, but by breaking the word down into its smaller parts, we were able to get pretty close to its actual definition (a disease caused by the inhalation into the lungs of extremely small or fine volcanic silicon dust particles!).  Most of our biology vocabulary this year won't be quite that intimidating, fortunately, but hopefully knowledge of some short prefix/suffix words commonly used in science will make it a bit easier to figure out the terms we encounter this year.

Some of the science "mini-words," or prefixes/suffixes we are learning to facilitate our understanding of scientific vocabulary!