On Wednesday, January 23rd our fourth grade students traveled to Plymouth Meeting Friends School to present all of the moldy facts they had been learning about in science class for the past month and a half.
Our adventure began outside with a walk around campus. We searched for as many kinds of fungi we could find. We then used the iNaturalist app on the iPads to identify them.
In science class we learned about the steps of the Scientific Method and practiced applying them by questioning whether different types of bread in different locations around the classroom would grow mold. The students concluded that bread that is moist and kept in places with limited sunlight grows more mold than bread that is dry and kept in places with extreme sunlight.
Once the students felt well-versed in their knowledge about mold, they set out to choose food items they wanted to use to study for five weeks and report about at Mold Symposium. The students came up with wonderful ideas and brought in items such blue cheese (the stinkiest project), cheddar cheese, strawberries (the moldiest project), apples, tortilla chips (the project with the least amount of mold or none at all for that matter) and more. We took pictures as we proceeded through the process. The students experienced many mixed emotions such as surprise, excitement, disgust, and disappointment.
Consumed by nervous energy yet excited to enter the final phase, the students presented their work. After debriefing about the Mold Symposium, I found that students loved the experience. Many students said they enjoyed meeting and playing with peers from the other schools, they enjoyed feeling successful after standing in front of groups of unfamiliar people and sharing the information from their display boards that they had worked so hard to create. The best part about the experience was the fun they had singing and dancing to the song they created entitled "Don't Touch It!"
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