MSU Extension 4-H Volunteering & Mentoring

Right. I would like to welcome everyone to today's Michigan Four H Volunteer webinar, and I'm very excited that we have two extension educators with us today of Darren Bagley and Tracy Agostino who will be talking to us about teaching science when you don't know Diddley squat. I will let them both give a quick introduction in a minute. But I just want to say I'm Christine heavily. I'm an extension educator based in Clinton County. And I use the she her hers pronouns and I support our volunteers across the state. But I'll let Tracy and Darren do a quick introduction too. Hi, I'm Darren. I'm housed in Flint. I do science education and I also do leadership, civic and cultural engagement. I do all sorts of fun things. I put mud on the faces of teenagers, and trump through swamps full of carnivorous plants, and jump in the Flint River and catch bugs to see what the water quality is like. I get the fun job of putting young people and politicians in the same room and watching what happens. And that's always fun too. I'll let Tracy introduce my pronouns. Are he him, his? I'm Tracy and I'm housed in Harrisville, so in Alcona County, science educator, a generalist. But I came from the world of formal education, strong connection with all of our Michigan educational standards. Part of my role before extension was helping to roll those out with teachers. I'm also very involved in place based education across the state. Really excited to be here. In my pronouns, are she and her? They have a wonderfully fun presentation plan for you today. But to get us started is MSU Extension fully believes in the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion. We know that human differences enrich our lives, our work in communities. We embrace our responsibility to be a resource for all and are committed to providing programs to all segments of the community. It is also important to understand the longstanding history and legacy of colonialism that has brought us all to reside in the land and seek and understanding our place within that history. The land acknowledgment is on the screen. That is one step in that process and as part of our process of doing this, I'm going to be putting into the chat quick demographic surveys. If you wouldn't mind please completing it actually darn already put it in for me to help us better understand how we're meeting. If you happen to be a Michigan State University Extension employee taking this as part of your role, please don't complete the survey. But if you're a volunteering as a volunteer, then you can complete the survey. So thank you and we'll give you a minute to complete that. The student high school public agency one. And then while you're completing it, I just want everyone to be aware that this is part of a series of webinars that we've been doing. There is a variety of different recordings already available from the webinars that we did in 2023. But then there is a whole bunch that are happening in 2024 this year that going on. There is the ones that are going on. There's this one today. There's another one on animal science on February 7. Then a variety of other ones happening throughout the rest of the year that you can find all the information and links on the link that Darren just put into the chat with all of our different webinars that we have coming about and they'll continue to the recordings will go there. Part of all of this, you can go to the next slide. Darn, I'll do the connection to thrive quick, is that we're doing this all to give volunteers the opportunity and the understanding of how do we help youth that paces where they thrive and belong in four H through knowing about the different project areas and programs. We don't need to be the expert in any of those areas, we just need to have some passion and excitement and can help you begin to learn. And when we think about teaching science, a Diddley squat, it's about asking questions, and that is helping you thrive. When we help you thrive, it's asking questions, it's showing support. It's building those relationships. It's helping develop that high quality relationships. And we do that by finding what you have a spark in. And understanding this resource that we have for you is one of those ways that you can do that. And at this time, I am actually turning it fully over to Darren and Tracy. So what do you think of when you hear the word scientist? Go ahead and you can put it in the chat or you can turn on your mic. What are the things that come to your mind when someone says scientists? What is the visual picture you have in your head of what a scientist is or what a scientist looks like? Bill the science guy. Yeah. Person who does science, someone in a lab. Lots of math experiments. I like that there, everyone. But when you do a Google search, here's some of the pictures that have come up for scientists. People in a lab coat with beakers and that kind of stuff. But here's a scientist, I don't know everything. That's why I'm sitting there in the corner with my dunce cap on. That's one of the keys to being a good scientist, though, is realizing you don't know everything. One thing that I'm very wary of is people who think they know everything. There's actually research found out that sometimes when people get new into a subject before they know a lot, they're confident shoots way up. Then the more they learn, the less confident they get. They go, oh, this is a lot more complicated than I realize it is. It's called the Dunning Kruger Effect. Now, here's another scientist. This is my kid. He's 12 now. He's about two in this picture. But going after that squirrel, what's going to happen by grab this tail? Is it going to jump? How's it going to feel? How's it going to react? Kids are naturally scientists. You don't need to do anything. They're going to ask questions and try to figure out the answer. Now I'm going to ask you to put a number in the chat on how well you agree with this statement. I am intimidated by teaching science. If you strongly disagree, if you're not intimidated at all by teaching science, put a one. If you are very intimidated by teaching science, put a ten. Or if you're right in the middle, you can put a five, or you can put a seven, or anything like that. We got some people in the middle. We've got some people at either end. Why do you think some folks are intimidated by teaching science? Because we found with our volunteers, with our staff, with teachers, particularly teachers who science isn't their background. Why do you think some folks are? They're new to a subject area? Yeah. They may not be familiar. Yes. I find that people are afraid to say I don't know. Yeah. That's the thing we hear most common. They don't think they know enough. They think that in order to be, to teach science, you have to know everything and it's okay not to know everything. Every scientist out there started somewhere, they started by asking questions. If you're asking a question, the reason you ask a question is because you don't know the answer. If you know the answer, then you're not doing science, you're just regurgitating something that someone else already figured out. Sometimes what we were taught in school as science wasn't really science. It was knowing that the planets are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, on down the line. That's not science. That's memorization. Science isn't knowing. Science is discovery. And I'm hoping by the end of this you'll realize it. All right. Here's another one to ten question adults. So let kids fail miserably. Or adults should set up situations where kids always succeed. 555 Some people on the lower end resolve for the fail now. And I'm interested if that word miserably wasn't in there, I think that would change. Change a lot but let kids fail. No, because we've all failed. We learned from that failure. Every time you did something, it worked perfectly. Every time you wouldn't be learning anything, you're just repeating. And then record those results when you fail. And maybe try to figure out why you failed. Say if there's something you can do differently so you won't fail this time. Keeping good records so you can understand where you fail and, and where you didn't. Also, not only is that important for science, it's important for life. You need resiliency. So when you lose at something or you fail that, you keep going and you don't go, oh, I'm done, I can't do it was me. Dana has got a great comment in there that she summed up that you learn more when you fail. One story I'd like to share about failure. When an adult let me fail. I was in Boy Scouts growing up. What we did is we had this trailer. That stuff got put in, and we wrote out a list, and the leaders made sure stuff got in the trailer. So when we got to the camp site, we would have what we needed. We created our own menu and everything, and one time, spaghetti was on the menu. We neglected to put on the list a pot to put the spaghetti. So when it came time to make dinner, when we're going to boil water to cook the spaghetti, we didn't have a pot. And we asked our leader and Mr. Johnson, he said, you didn't put it on the list. He had a big smile on his face. We ate raw spaghetti noodles dipped in the sauce. The leaders have brought sandwiches for themselves because they didn't want to eat that. But guess what? Every single time after that, we remembered to put the stuff on the list. Did we fail? Yes. Was miserable. Yeah, it's pretty miserable eating raw spaghetti noodles, but we were okay. We didn't die, we didn't get sick. It wasn't anything horrible. But we remembered from that failure. Now, when a kid asks something, if they ask you a question, how should you respond? Because you're on this call and you guys are connected to four H. I know you're all really smart people and you've got all this knowledge in your head, and you want to take this knowledge from your head and share it with all the young people around you. But I would say, yeah, that's a good question. What do you think and encourage them to think about it themselves? Because people, not just youth, but everyone's so used to getting an answer on their phone when they ask a question. A lot of the answers aren't any good and they lack that discernment and I don't know, what do you think that also teaches them that it's okay not to know asking a question back. So answering a question with a question is a good choice as well. And so Tracy, this is a good, I'm going to ask Tracy a question, we're going to role play a little bit. So why is the sky blue? Oh, yes it is. But why, why? I think the sky is blue. Because of the sunlight. Yeah, the sunlight is not blue. How do you know? Because the sun up in the sky, it's not blue. What color is it? It's yellow. Is it yellow? I think it's white. You can just keep going on with dialogue like that. How do you respond when you say what do you think? And the kid goes, I don't know. I'm going to take this one real quick. One of the things that I've discovered over time is that we all fear being wrong, fear of failure. Fear of being wrong sometimes means we're ridiculed and we're uncomfortable with that idea. One of the things that works for me to draw students out, draw you out, is to be ridiculously with my answer that they could possibly be as wrong as I was. Okay. So even if their answer is wrong, they're still better than I was. And that seems to help kids some of my favorite answers and I didn't do it with Darren and I should've was space alien. I tell kids a lot of things are caused by space aliens. When they really want me to answer it, they know darn well that's not the case. But it does encourage them to offer their thoughts and ideas, lets them know it's okay to try something and have it be wrong. Because when a kid has something, don't answer the question, try to get them to figure it out themselves. As an educator, one of the greatest joys I feel are lightbulb moments, when someone I'm working with gets the thing that they didn't understand before and the metaphorical light bulb goes on over their head, and it's such a powerful thing. Think about a time when you've had those light bulb moments. The joy you get, something you've been struggling with and trying to figure out, oh, that's it. It's a powerful thing. When a kids ask you a question and you just give them an answer, you're robbing them of that joy. You're taking that joy of discovery away from them. A lot of the research around the best practices for engaging kids around stem or science issues tells us that when we figure it out, when kids figure it out on their own or with our guiding questions, they pull that into their frame of reference and they own that knowledge is theirs. Where when we just tell people answers, we don't tend to hold onto that information and we don't learn that and really embed that in our understanding of the world. That discovery, the joy of discovery, has so many important features. Science is as simple as getting your hands dirty. Hopefully, you've all gotten your hands dirty. Some point in time, your hands are dirty. You go through a series of asking questions and trying to figure out the answer. My hands are dirty, how do I get them clean? You might wipe them off on your shirt. See if that works. If that doesn't work, you might try water. Then you might try warm water, then you might try, so if that doesn't work, you might try a different kind of soap. Even though you aren't formally asking those questions in your head, you're going through that process in your mind and you're doing science all the time. All right? We're going to do a quick little science experiment. Find a scrap piece of paper somewhere. Just find a piece of junk paper and make a paper airplane. I'm going to do this too here. I'm going to make my paper airplane. It's a little noisy, I apologize for that. Make that paper airplane as best you can, and then stand across the room, and of course you're probably not going to see me because I got a background filter on. Well, there I am still back there. All right. And then try to hit the bull's eye. There we go, with the paper airplane. And let's see if you can hit it, we'll see. Oh, I hit a button on my keyboard, taking it back to the slide, nice. All right, let me skip through these pretty fast. There we go. There we go. All right, so I didn't hit the screen, I hit my keyboard. I failed. What I noticed when I built my airplane is that it's heavy near the tip. And it went down Instead of going straight at the screen. Maybe I'll get more lift. If I adjust it, the wings are wider and then maybe it won't sink as much. We'll see if that adjustment helps. And maybe hopefully I won't go to the first slide again. We'll see. All right. Did anybody else hit the target? When I did that, it messed up entirely. It didn't fly straight at all. Last time at least flew straight and it went off to another part of the room. And then my cat got upset and asked me what I was doing. So that's all it takes to do, to do science. And one of our deadly Swat lessons is does the type of paper matter when you make a paper applied? So you can use newspaper, you can use magazines, you can use scrap paper. You can adds anything to see if it makes a difference. Failure is good. You learn if it worked the first time. There's no principles, you're getting out of it. Does anybody know who these folks are here on the screen? Old trivia here. I know you still might be paper airplanes. These are all scientists. The right brothers. Perfect. Yeah, the right brothers. A. Marie Curie. Good one. Katrina names. All right. See if anybody can get the third one. Washington Carver. There you go. All right. Yes. All scientists and the right brothers. When they started building their airplane, they didn't know it was going to fly. It failed a whole bunch of times. Marie Curie doing her experiments for radiation didn't know what was going to happen. She actually ended up killing her to her science. So hopefully that doesn't happen to you guys and George Washington Carver. He didn't know all the different things you could do with sweet potatoes and peanuts before he started, he tried it and some things failed and some things didn't. They found out all kinds of things. Science isn't knowing the answer. Science is figuring it out. All right. Anybody know what this plane is right here? I'll give you a hint, your first answer might be wrong, because especially in four H, a lot of people have a guess what the first thing is, what it is. Now, I just threw people for a loop, because now they might be afraid to try it. Failure is good. Failure is good for it. Shamrock? No, it's actually Oxalis. It's also called Wood sorrel. One thing different than a clover. Clovers have round leaves, and these have heart shaped leaves, and it's the genus Oxalis. It's edible. It's got the sour rhubarb, if you've ever had rhubarb tasting leaves to it, there's not a lot that looks like it and kids like to eat it up in big bunches. Know what that is, Critter. I've seen him a lot before. I've been bitten by him before too. They got a little piercing mouth part and you ever got blood drawn by a nurse that doesn't know what they're doing. They've got this needle mouth and they stab it in there. And they wiggle it around and you might say things you're not supposed to say in a four H group. When they do that, it hurts a little bit. This is a bell. It's also called a giant water bug called a toe, just because you don't know that that's okay. And just like the wood sorrel, it's also edible. You can eat those guys too. They're crunchy, they're a texture, and I've caught them and eaten them before. But knowing that isn't the answer, it isn't science. Science is where might you find those bugs? What might be the best time of day to catch? If you look at an insect, are there any things you could do to make some characteristics about poisonous insects to eat versus edible ones? How can we test those ideas? Do you eat them all? And then if they kill you, make you sick, then you know, like that probably wouldn't be a way to do it. Science is observing, predicting, experimenting, interpreting, watching, guessing, playing, explaining simple language. There are things that everyone does anyway. They observe things. They make predictions. They play science as a shape. Now, some people might see it as a circle. It's not that way, because in a circle you just wind up where you started. You aren't making any progress. Science is a vine where you keep growing over and over again with new questions. There you go, Tracy. Go ahead. If you might have floating around your office or if you reach out to the science team, we do have slinky, or we can't technically call them a slinky. We use this spiral when we talk about what is science and the process of science. Because while you circle around and around and around, every time you circle around, you are, you're moving to a different location because you've learned things. You have new questions that come out of what you've learned. And so we really like to represent it as the spring or slinky, and then those are our favorite ways of representing it. And I do have a box of slinkies floating around. If you have a need for, you could copy e mail and we'll see if I getting you something to use. Science Acti. All right? I need to volunteer someone who's willing to put their mic on and talk to me for a bit. It won't be difficult. I promise. I can be your volunteer, Darrow. All right. Okay. All right. This is a cat? No, it's not. How do you know it's not a cat? Because I can see it's not a cat. How do you know it's not a cat? I mean, it's got two eyes. Cats have two eyes because it doesn't look like it's wearing a chicken costume. It looks like that's probably attached. Oh, so what is it, A chicken? What makes a chicken different from a cat? They're physical features. Mainly like what? They have two less legs. Yeah, they have two legs instead of four. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. They don't have pointy ears on top. They have them on the side. Okay. All right. They have a beak instead of a mouth? Yeah. So where are the chickens ears? Over here, I believe. Not up here. Okay. All right, anything else? I mean, their textures are very different. One has feathers, one has fur. Feathers versus fur. Okay. Yeah, those are all. All right. So I'll buy that. So this is a chicken and not a cat. All right, What about this? This is a cat. This is likely not a cat either. What is it? It looks like perhaps part of Harry Potter. This is actually, there's a four age staffers at Christy Euster House. This is her dog, and it's adorable dog. But you said cats have four legs? It has four legs. It does have four legs. It has no f this is all true. No, that's not a cat. I'm going to say it's not a cat because it does not look like species of cats. I know instead, it looks like a species of dog. But what makes it different than a cat? What makes a dog different from a cat? It wants to be around me versus hiding from me. At least if you're my pet, I have two cats and anybody has any thoughts and wants to help you. So you feel free to put thoughts into the chat as well with a chicken. It was pretty easy, but like almost everybody knows that's a dog, not a cat. But when you ask why it really gets you thinking, and you can do this with four H if you happen to go to the fair and they've got cattle and sheep. What makes cattle different from sheep? Hard, makes a sheep different from a goat. And it's all conversations that you can get into around that. And you don't have to go someplace. You can pull something out of your lunch to initiate these conversations. These are some of the best conversations to help you develop their skills. Just observation and being aware, and learning communication skills, all sorts of things that are really important for our youth. One of my favorite is to pull my orange or my apple, whatever fruit I happen to have out of my lunch bag. Say I look at my beautiful apple, I am going to enjoy eating this for lunch. Don't you like my beautiful apple? And of course, the kids argue with me because obviously it's not an apple. But I'm really convinced it's an apple and they have to try to convince me it's not. It really helps kids develop their language skills, their observation and language skills and communication. It is an amazingly fun, simple activity to do, and it develops so many really important skills. Whether it's a picture of a chicken that you call a cat, or it's an item that you pick up and refer to as something else. I've spent over a half hour arguing with my children when they were little on a car ride, that the sky was green, a beautiful shade of green. And they're like, Mom, no, it's blue. And I'm like, no, I really think it's a beautiful shade of green. All right. So it's a really great way. I think it's a lot of fun and it builds a lot of skills to deal with a lot of other things and discern science is not Google. Google is a wonderful thing. I use Google and I use Wikipedia every single day. And they're helpful things. But why not rely on Google all the time? I mean, it's a very convenient tool or you can ask Alexa a question or, you know, whatever, you know, whatever it is you've got. Why not just rely on that to figure things out? The answer is probably pretty obvious because you're not learning. It doesn't encourage the thinking, it cannot be true. This is something I found on Google now. They've updated it recently. Whale watching in the Great Lakes. No whales in the Great Lakes. It's a very scientific looking article and it's completely false. And not just Google, but lots of social media platforms out there that you can gather information from. Okay. What I want you to do is without moving your head, move your eyeballs to the left and the right. And notice what you see. Okay. See what you can see. Now, take your hands and do this and do the same thing. Notice how it affects your vision. You're limited. Every time you click on something, it's like you're putting on blinders. You're limiting what you see. You can do a search for white tailed deer. Now if you're before you search for white tailed deer, let's say you're searching for puppies and kittens and whatever. You might get a picture that looks like this, that's a picture of white tailed deer. Because what all these social media platforms do is they look at what you clicked on before. They try to meet your needs. They try to give you what you want and they also want to keep you on their platform as long as possible so they can make more money. Now let's say you weren't searching up puppies and kittens and squirrels. Let's say before you typed white tailed deer in your search, let's say you were looking up ammunition or bows or things like that. You might get a picture like this of a white tailed deer. Very different picture, but they're both pictures. The thing about all these media platforms that they give you things that look like what you looked like before. If you type Joe Biden as a genius in whatever platform you have, you're going to get more things that make Joe Biden look good. If you type Joe Biden as an idiot, you're going to get more things that make Joe Biden look bad. Because these platforms are all trying to keep you there as long as possible. And they're trying to serve you, they're trying to give you what you're looking for. It'll reinforce those things that you already think you know. All right, we've got another experiment. Take another scrap piece of paper you can use, the same one used for a paper airplane. And before you do anything, I want you to put in the chat. How many times you think you can fold a piece of paper in half and still rip it like fold it in half? Once. That would be once. And then double it over again, that would be twice. How many times you can fold a piece of paper in half and still rip it? Janelle says 87, Amy, six, Katrina. All right, and after you put your prediction and then six. All right there. 75, Dana, Six. Okay. We got our predictions. Let's go ahead and try paper. Was the highest. One was seven, the highest. I got a scroll. Eight was the highest. Okay. All right. We see I've got 12345, 56. I, I think I can only fold it six times. I don't think I can fold it more than six. I would need a bigger piece of paper to fold it more than six. So were you folding it like opposite ways or your fan folding it? Well, I was I was thinking fold it in half and then fold it in half. Fold a half, but it might depend on how you fold it. That is true. That's a that's a good point. Because double your paper going through with six times six squared. Is it six squared or is it two to the six? Figure that out. How many layers of paper are you going through? It's so be two to the sixth power. That's math. That's hard. We can just count after you fold it up, you can unfold it and count the squares and see how many layers of paper you had to go through. So I'm guessing eight maybe. What's the actual result? How many could you fold and still tear? I could not, I could not tear through six folds. I cannot tear through five either. I can do four, I can do four but I cannot do five. Christine got five, Tyne got three. Easy Science. And then you can ask more questions like how do you fold the paper? I could do eight because I fan folded. And you didn't say fold in half. I didn't. And there will be somebody who will think about that which is really cool. You know, when you're folding them, if you do not make them even like one side, slightly down, you can fold again. Here again, either the avenues you can go with this question are so much fun. Yeah. Yeah. And like challenging kids to figure out how to do it. Yeah. How it requires no special equipment. No me, all the things we've done so far have been things you can do with stuff you have sitting wherever you're watching this web. So you might have not had scrap paper and had to go wander and find it. Pretty simple stuff, yeah. All right. So science is not a recipe. I was at a science night at my kids school and they did this little experiment where they made ice cream. Some of you done it before. You take two Ziplock baggies. One you put some ice and some salt. In the other you put some cream and some sugar and some vanilla. Shake it up and mash it around. And eventually, as the ice melts, it pulls heat out of the milk mixture and it freezes, you get ice cream. There's one child who was there wasn't working right. And someone else said, oh, someone else had ice cream and they don't like ice cream in their lactose inline or something. So here you can just have theirs and send them on their way. That just left me so frustrated because it wasn't a snack time. It was a science night at the school. They're supposed to be teaching science, not teaching how to make ice cream. Why didn't it work? Let's see if we can figure that out. Is there something did you forget to put the salt in? Were the bags lined up right? Are you not shaking around enough? How long have you been so many questions to try to figure it out instead of just, here's your ice cream. Move on your way. Why do people like recipes like when you're cooking? Why do you like a recipe? Because it's tested. It's predict science. I like it. Hopefully, if you follow the recipe, you're going to get the food that you're trying to get. That's why we like recipes. They're predictable. If you've got a recipe and you don't understand the science and it doesn't turn out, then you don't know why. You're like, oh, well the recipe was bad. It might not be the recipe was bad. It could be just you didn't interpret the recipe, right, when you cream butter and sugar together till it's light and fluffy. What does light and fluffy mean? I don't know what's light and fluffy to me, might not be light and fluffy to you. Makes me think of a cartoon I use in some of my professional development. It has a lady with a cookbook propped up and she's reading and it says, separate two eggs and she has an egg in each hand and she's holding that part. Obviously, she does not understand what they mean. What the analogy I'll use as a recipe is direction, science as a map. Some of you are old enough to remember the old mapquest days where you had to print out the directions to figure out where you're going. But the downside of that is if there's an accident or the roads under construction, you're out of luck because it tells you how to get from point A to point B following a particular path. Whereas if you have a map and there's an accident somewhere, you know all the other possibilities of what you can try to get to your destination. That's what I always prefer, a map over directions. All right, we've got another experiment here. Well, here, let me go back to you on the show. This is, we're going to do another hearing one later, but all right, can you hear better with bigger ears? I'm going to ask you to back away from the screen, and I'm going to whisper at you, back, back away if you can. And I'm going to start whispering. And notice, is there a way you can make bigger ears? Take your hands and cut your hands behind your ears like this. Then I'm going to start whispering again. And then move your hands away from your head and then try again. Notice how much different affects your aft your hands come behind your ears, is that what are you? Did you guys notice a difference there? And if you did, I'm guessing that some of you did, You might not all. Does that mean that animals with bigger ears hear better? Does an elephant hear better than a mouse? Or if you're in a four H club that's got bunnies, pointy ear bunnies hear better than floppy eared bunnies. What do you think? How would you test that? How would you test if floppy pointy eared bunnies hear better than floppy ear bunnies? Because you'd think if their ears are covered because they're flopped down, they might not hear as well. How could you test that hypothesis? Or with goats, there's floppy ear goats and pointy ear goats. Same with dogs. Yeah. Does a bassett hound not hear as good as a doberman And trying to figure out an experiment that you could test. You could do that if there's someone who's got a floppy ear bunny and someone who's got a pointy ear bunny, ask maybe to train them that every time you feed them, ring a bell every day for a month before you feed them. Then move the bell further and further away and see when you get a reaction and when you don't. Now is that because of the ears? Maybe one bunny's older and it doesn't hear as good because it's losing its hearing. Maybe it's a breed, maybe they're actually smelling the food and they're not hearing the sound. There's all sorts of other explanations but it's something you could try. All right, so these are the science and engineering practices. I'm going to turn this over to Tracy because she knows them better than I do. All right? Yeah. As Darren said, these are the science and engineering practices. They are one component of Michigan science standards. We talk about the three dimensions of our science standards. Michigan has adopted the next generation science standards. If you Google that, you'll find all kinds of information on them. And there are three components of it. There are the disciplinary core ideas, and those were the facts, the memorization that have been part of our science education for as long as I can remember and longer. Then there is what we call a cross cutting concepts. And those are ideas that are across all different avenues of science and life, like seeing patterns or cause and effect. There are seven of those, then there are, these are the science and engineering practices. This is doing science. This is the first time across many states, but very definitely in Michigan that we actually have educational standards that are based in the research based best practices for engaging kids. One of that is the key part is engaging kids. We don't even actually call them standards anymore, We call them performance expectations. This is what kids can do in four H. We have been engaging you in experiential learning and applying knowledge and testing knowledge. We've been doing these science and engineering practices since the beginning of Four H. We do this amazingly well. Knowing that it connects with our educational standards can be a leverage or a foot in the door to be able to receive funding or to engage with other schools. Be able to engage a broader audience. Now we very intentionally wrote every single one of our teaching science when you don't know Diddley squat lessons. With these science and engineering practices in mind, you'll see the practices, a little headers above different parts of the activities. Those are just so that you can see where each of these practices are being called out. Every practice is in every diddly squat and they're not supposed to be in everything that you do. But this is the fun part of science. These are, and also these are good life skills to definitely engaging in argument from evidence, analyzing, interpreting data. It's important for choosing political candidates for all sorts of stuff. They all connect to each other. They do the C. They cross over with English Language Arts standards, our social studies standards, there's a lot of cross. These ideas are across all of the core curriculum ideas. Another question, we've got kids hear things that adults can't. We're going to test that this has different frequencies of sound. I'm guessing some of you will be able to hear these things somewhat. Now, I'm going to warn you, it's an annoying sound. It's a pretty high pitched beep. I'm going to play those. I'm going to start at 8 kilohertz and move up to 22. And notice if you can hear it now that come through. Yeah, I can tell by Tracy's face that came through. That was 8 kilohertz. Here's ten. So Tracy Tracy saying she didn't hear that. Ten. I didn't hear it either. 12, 14 Tracy, I'm not hearing anything. There was a quick crack at the beginning of that one. Yes. 15 Oh, Jennifer's hearing all? Yeah. 16, 17, 18. Anybody still here? No. No, I don't hear. Jennifer dropped out at 15:19 Ten said she thought at 15 or at 19:20 I think everybody might be out in 18. Katrina heard 18. All right. 21. 17. So why is that? Why do you think young people can hear things that adults and my guess is Katherine. I know Katherine. She's my office. She's pretty young. Some people can hear things more than others. What would be the reason for that? Why is it related to frequency rather than volume? Now, there's some interesting store owners who caught onto this and they were having problems with some teenagers hanging around in their store and causing trouble. They played this high pitch noise that the teenagers could hear and the adults couldn't to keep them away from their store. Now another thing, also the students who wanted to know when they got a message on their phone. So they put that high pitch noise and the teachers couldn't hear it, but the other students could. They can do it. Yeah. Yeah. Ear damage, probably too many rock concerts. I mowed a lot of lawns when I was a kid. I mow like as soon as I was done mowing lawn between myself and my grandparents and a rental house my parents had in a small business they had, I just had to go back over and over and once more. But what might there be applications for that? All sorts of things. Another lesson. If you've got a fair in your community, this is another one you could do. Sheep and cattle are both ruminant animals, which means they both have the four chambered stomachs. They both have similar diets. They both eat grain and hay. Why do sheep have little pellet poops, and cows have big poppy poops? One thing about this question is it's difficult to get an answer on Google, and I'm not sure there is an answer. This is one of my favorite lessons, one of my favorite dial squads. Because we partnered with a zoo to be able to get some pictures of some exotic animals and some unique animals. You'll find our traditional domestic animals that darn showing here, but you'll also find pictures of animal poop that are unique. They have similar diet. It's not that different metabolic processes that can mean a lot of different things. Like what would be the advantage for one or the other advantage evolutionarily or whatever for sheep to have little pellets and cows to how the colon moves. Sometimes you'll say well cattle are bigger then I say we do a call. Pellets. No, it still has the smaller but they're still, there's all sorts of things. So another thing you can ask is, well, how much water does each of them drink Now, cattle drink more water because they're bigger but in proportion to their size. And then maybe you could get some kids doing math. How much water does the cattle drink versus sheep? Sheep don't drink very much water. Even if you have a bunch of sheep, they don't drink very much water compared to cattle. Why would that be? Where did they originate, Where were they originally domesticated, and what were those environments like? I'm going to leave you puzzling and thinking about that. I'm not going to give you any answers because I'm not sure there are. This is science, but it's also about life skills. When you have a problem, you can use science to figure it out. You try something, you fail, you try something else. When you're making decisions, who do you vote for? What do you want to take for a career path? You can use science, asking questions and trying to figure out the answer. As part of that process, I'm going to turn this over to you, Tracy. One of my favorite, I like candy and this is one of my favorite quotes by Isabel. My mother made me a scientist without ever intending to every other child after school is asked, what did you learn today? And not my mother. She would say, did you ask a good question today? The different asking a good question made me become a science. I didn't come across this until my children were grown up. And I thought, Dan, what about all those miss opportunities? Because family dinner, I'm saying, what did you learn today? What did you do in school? And I never asked, did you ask a good question? Depending on the age of the youth, that question can be very different. So, I have a four year old grandchild, Regan. Did you ask a good question today? In preschool? Yes. Nana, I asked where the bathroom was. That's a really good question for a four year old. And did you make it? Yes. Nao. We celebrate. Now, if a senior or 12th grader came in and said that was the question they asked, there'd be a problem. The questions can vary, but the idea of asking questions and discovering answers and just some natural curiosity, really fostering that curiosity is one of the best gifts that we can give and how we can engage kids in science. Tracy already put in the chat our series there. All these lessons are designed to be taught without any science background. With stuff you probably have around your house already. Maybe a quick trip to the store for some of them. But in general, it's stuff that you probably already have. Most of them are set up, like if you've got a club meeting coming up or something like that and, and I don't know what I'm going to do. You can look through these and figure something out pretty quick. And the experiments we did today, most of them are part of it and they're pretty easy. Although there's guidelines, there's questions to ask in the lessons you're going to find as you come through it, the kids are going to have more questions and run down that path and try to figure it out. And that's okay, because that's what science is about, asking questions and trying to figure out the answer. Do you guys have any questions or anything we talked about today? Any thoughts or just comments that you want to share about the session? I do want to share a couple of things about the website before we pop into questions. If you go to the teaching science when you don't know diddly squat website, you're going to see in part of the introduction that there's a short survey that you can take to help provide us some information as we continue to improve and to write Diddley squats that meet the needs of our four H leaders and volunteers. There's also an introduction to it. We were asked a few years ago to put together a little bit of a guideline for clover buds. If you work with the young kids in for it, then that clover bud document might be useful to you as well. We were also asked to put together a bit of a supply list, and there's a spreadsheet in there on the website at the top that show you in a quick snapshot of what supplies you might be. There you go. Darren's got showing them. So there's a short survey up there. And each one, if you click on one of those, each one takes you to a page where you can have the document as an HTM document that you can just keep live on your tablet, phone, whatever, or it also has a really nice clean PDF that easy to print off and have consolidated. We attempted to keep most of down to just the two pages. The animal poop one does have lots of images that links not working. That one's not linking. Oh, fill those. Yes, we do. The links to the pictures. I clicked on a couple of the pictures while we were doing it. I will stop the recording but.