Because sometimes I need a break from writing report cards, I thought I’d share a few of the highlights of the last weeks of the school year:

• Open lab time with the electricity supplies. I basically let the third graders loose on the wires, batteries and Christmas tree lights (best cheap bulbs for projects!) along with the miscellaneous odds and ends I have for inventions. They came up with amazing, amusing projects. My favorite was the light-up mustache!
• First graders designed their own parachutes, and we launched them from the top of the playground climbing structure.
• More and more children are coming to the lab during recess with things they found - snail shells, wasps’ nests, wild cucumber fruit all covered in spikes - to hang on the Discovery Wall.
• A note from a kindergartner declaring, “I love you!”
• Tomorrow the second graders will make Gak, a slimy borax-and-glue polymer that bounces and stretches delightfully.

I have identical twins in my kindergarten classes, in separate classes, of course. On Friday, I read Are You A Butterfly? aloud to one group. When I read that the Queen Alexandra butterfly is the biggest in the world at 11 inches across, the girl who is a twin piped up, “That’s exactly one inch less than a foot!”

Today I read the same book to her sister’s class, and when I read about the Queen Alexandra butterfly, the twin also exclaimed, “That’s an inch less than a foot!”

My jaw just dropped. If they were older, I’d suspect them of pulling a prank to startle me - but these are the sweetest six-year-olds I’ve ever met! I’m a firm believer in treating twins as the separate people that they are, but - wow!

I think this is the first time a student has actually given me an apple for the teacher. (Apologies to M. Magritte.)

Tiger the snake shed today, for the first time since she’s been in my classroom! It was SO COOL.

(Also, I’ve definitely been meaning to update here more. Had all kinds of great plans. Then report card writing time hit, so all my words have been going to that…)

I got a catalog from the Bio Corporation today, from which I could order things like fetal pigs and preserved turtles, if I taught high school biology… or was just a creepy person, I guess. (The preserved skinned pregnant cats are the ones that weird me out the most. They cost $47 if they are triple-injected to show the arteries, veins, and hepatic portal system. I have no idea if that’s a good bargin. But I digress.)

Before I recycled it, I flipped through it idly. It opened to a page of Anatomical Charts, which included everything from “Whiplash Injuries of the Head and Neck” to “Pharynx & Larynx.” The first one was the simple poster, “The Muscular System.” Next, “The Female Muscular System.”

Wait, what?

Somehow it wouldn’t bug me if they only had a muscular system chart with a male figure. It’d be cool, too, if they had “The Male Muscular System” and “The Female Muscular System,” even though the muscles are almost all the same. Even better, sell both with the title “The Muscular System” and just differentiate them in the product description rather than on the charts themselves. But the way they’ve done it puts “male” as default and “female” as “other”. This kind of thing raises my hackles more than most people would find reasonable, perhaps because I teach at a girls’ school. I know, we’ve come a long, long way in the past century, but this lingering unintentional sexism still rankles.

P.S. Bonus homogeneity points on the rest of your posters, too, Bio Corporation. Of the 40 posters that have visible skin, 37 are clearly Caucasian. The smiling woman on “Understanding Type 1 Diabetes” might be Asian and the figure on “Pregnancy and Birth” is possibly a light-skinned Hispanic woman. Only “Risks of Obesity” clearly shows a person of color - a black woman in a single-piece bathing suit who is, incidentally, not in the least bit obese. Also, all six charts about the eye and eye disorders show a blue iris. C’mon.

The second graders learned how to measure weight, which led to a discussion about how many grams of sugar are in various breakfast cereals. The surprise “winner” (or loser?), was Raisin Bran, with 18g of sugar in a serving. That’s still much less than soda, though. Pictured with a 20-oz bottle of Coke is its approximate sugar content: 65g, or about the same as 19 sugar cubes. The class also calculated that the ENTIRE tub of animal cookies contains 10g less sugar than the bottle of Coke!

This has nothing at all to do with teaching, or science. But it falls into the category of “things I can’t help but smile at.”

Why don’t they sell boxes of just black crayons? I estimate they get consumed about five times faster than orange ones…

New Year’s resolution: more posts!

And, in that spirit, here is a recipe for gluten-free play dough, which I use in various activities in the science room like modeling the rock cycle or making bird nests. I use flour-based play dough sometimes, too, but I have had students who cannot eat or touch gluten so I needed a flourless alternative. This recipe comes from tweaking and adapting some that I found online.

You can double this recipe for more play dough. If you want to make more than one color, add the food coloring when you knead the dough - but you might want to knead it in a bag or wear gloves, or you’ll wind up with technicolor hands!

Cooked Gluten-Free Play Dough

1/2 cup salt
1/3 cup water
1/2 cup baking soda
1/2 cup+ cornstarch
1/4 cup cold water
1 t vegetable oil
food coloring

Combine the salt and 1/3 cup of water in a saucepan. Heat for 3-4 minutes at a medium level until the water boils. Meanwhile, mix the cornstarch and the cold water in a glass measuring cup. Add a bit more cornstarch if you can get it to mix in. (A side note: Cornstarch and water make a non-Newtonian fluid which becomes hard when you press on it and then runny when you stop pressing. It can be fun to play with all on its own!)

Take the pan off the heat. Add the baking soda, food coloring and oil to the salt and water. Stir to mix. Pour in the cornstarch and water mixture. Stir until thickened. At first it won’t look at all like playdough, but then it will suddenly gelatinize and thicken. Let the dough cool and knead it on a board dusted with cornstarch.

Store in a ziplock bag or an airtight container, and it will keep for a couple weeks.

Best kindergarten answers:

“I want to be a person that works with cats and dogs. With their skins.” She meant a pet groomer.

“A doctor. That works with dead people.”

Child thinks about it a long time, looking a little worried. “I think I just want to be myself. Because I just want to go to work.”