You Can See a Lot Just by Observing

Yogi Berra's famous malapropism takes on new meaning in learning and teaching science. Science really does begin with observation. Some recent work with a pre-kindergarten class that had become fascinated with fungus illustrated this for me. Their classroom teacher and I were taking them on a walk through a wooded area near their classroom to look more closely at the woodrat nests we had seen on an earlier visit. Looking for woodrat nests is a bit like looking for green cars; at first you don't see any, but once you start thinking about them, you see them everywhere.

There is an even earlier step when you first learn to recognize an object, such as a woodrat nest or a fungus. This too is a learning process. Usually when viewing something new, such as the woods, people see an undifferentiated blur. Then when someone points something out to you, shows you how that this thing, this rock, this nest, this lichen, can be separated from the blurry mass, it springs into reality. You can now see it where before you could not.

As we walked, one of the children pointed out a lichen on a tree and asked, "What's this?" We all looked at it and told the children it was a lichen. We told them that lichen was pretty interesting as it is a double organism, a partnership between an alga, which makes food, and a fungus, which provides the protective structure or home for the partnership. Most of them has seen algae on a pond and almost everyone knew about mushrooms, a very familiar type of fungus. Now that lichen had an image, a name, and some information connected with it, they started spotting lichen everywhere on our walk and wherever they went in the following days.

This strand of our curriculum emerged as the children began to see other organisms that resembled the lichen they had first seen. Some of these are lichen, too, we told them, but of a different kind. The first one we had seen was a foliose lichen. They were now looking at crustose lichen, which lie flat on a bare rock or tree trunk. Once you start seeing two types of something, you have a deeper concept or what the organism is, as well as what it is not. This is also the start of classification and taxonomy.

Crustose lichen. source:  Wikipedia

The PK class was on fire and the study deepened and broadened as they started looking at mushrooms as well and learning about the different types of mushrooms. The classroom teacher found nature books about mushrooms, as well as stories about mushrooms. We found that a husband-and-wife team of naturalists in our community that specialized in mushrooms and we learned the terms mycology and mycologists. They walked with the class in the woods and took the class much deeper into the study of mushrooms: how they get food, how they propagate, how they fit into the larger ecosystem. They class then delved into learning the parts of mushrooms and how these parts work together, structure and function. We dissected mushrooms in class and looked at them closely with our eyes and hand lenses.  We looked at slices of the mushrooms under microscopes, taking slices from caps, gills, stem, and any other part that looked interesting to them.

Observation is fundamental to all science.  All science begins with observation and it had long been the first among the process skills of science.  I like a great deal about the new Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), but I am puzzled why the framers left observation out of the new Practices of Science and Engineering.  I've heard it said that they just presumed that observation was so obvious that it needed no mention.  I would agree that it should be obvious, but so is Asking Questions, which made the cut.  So is Analyzing and Interpreting Data.  So I am still puzzled.   Meanwhile, I continue to teach my students to observe the world around them.  Woodrat nests and lichen are good starting points.