by Nicole Casasa-Blouin
After noticing pine trees on our school campus had roots sticking up out of the ground, 4th grade students at Gerald E. Talbot Community School, Portland, Maine conducted investigations to explore why this is happening and make a plan to fix the problem.
To launch this life science unit, students created a T Chart with “I Notice” and “I Wonder” on each side and spent time investigating the tree and the roots to write down their thoughts.
This simple, yet powerful routine supports students’ curiosity and understanding of the scientific principles being explored.
Once done listing observations and generating questions independently, students shared out their thinking as a tool to further their understanding and curiosity about the tree and its roots. By explaining their thoughts, students accessed their prior knowledge and taught their peers new vocabulary words like pine needles, pine cones, tree trunk, and tree bark.
Students’ questions also were listed on their Class Question Board. 
Students Create Initial Model and Revisions To further explore the exposed tree roots phenomenon, students created an initial model to make their thinking visible and hypothesize why the tree roots are exposed. 
As students investigated, researched, and learned more, these models were revisited and revised to reflect students’ more thorough and complex understanding of why the roots are exposed.
Proposed Cause and Solution
Once students understood the impact that the slant of the hill has on eroding away the topsoil and exposing the roots, they wanted to find a solution! Through reading, watching videos, and class conversations, students developed a proposal to make a mulch bed to help protect the tree and its roots.
Enacting the Solution
Students will be making a mulch bed for the trees. It would be really powerful for students to write persuasive letters to local gardening stores explaining the problem and their proposed solution. Unfortunately, we ran out of class time and needed to move on to our next unit. For this year, we teachers reached out to find donations and once we get the mulch, students will make the mulch bed for the tree.
Class Question Board
As the unit progressed, students’ further questions, investigation methods, findings, products, and next steps were added to the Class Question Board. The Question Board provided organization and additional structure to students’ investigation.
As noted by Weizman, Shwartz & Fortus there are four advantages to using class Question Boards as an instructional tool to help students make sense of phenomena:
- Helps students make connections between activities and anchoring phenomena / focus question
- Helps organize learning into a road map for students
- Scaffolds the student practice of asking questions
- Develops student ownership of the content and builds class community
Nicole Casasa-Blouin is a 4th grade teacher at Gerald E. Talbot Community School in
Portland, Maine. This is her sixth year teaching at Talbot and she is passionate about integrating content into her literacy instruction. She can be reached at blouik@portlandschools.org.
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