Welcome to the Post-it® Teachers’ Activity Center

Step 1: Day 1: Observations and inferences. Teach students an observation is knowledge we can learn using our five senses. Inferences are when we use our brain to learn new information by putting together two or more observations. Give the students an object (apple, can of soda etc.). Ask them to make observations about the object and write them on Post-it® Notes. Have the students make a chart with five columns label the columns seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling. Have the students put their Post-it Note observations in the appropriate column. Anything that does not fit in a particular column is an inference.

Step 2: Day 2: Graphing and predicting. Teach students that a graph is making a visual representation (a picture) that shows data. Teach them that predicting means using data to determine what would happen in a similar situation. Tell students that they will be playing a game with pennies. They will have a cup with 100 pennies. They will dump the pennies out and remove all of the tails. They will put the heads back in the cup and keep dumping it out until they are all gone. Students write their name on a Post-it Note as well as a guess for how many times they will need to dump out the cup until the pennies are gone. Tell students to put the Post-it Notes in order on the wall. (Guess what they just made a number/line histogram! Tell the students that this is one type of graph) Then let students play the game. They will record the dump number as well as the number of pennies that are left after that dump. They will graph their data on graph paper. (Essentially they are making an expotential growth and decay graph. For advanced students you can ask them to look at the graph and try to come up with situations that the graph could describe (animals going extinct etc). Have the students predict what would happen if they had 200 pennies instead of 100 or 50 pennies.

Step 3: Day 3: Classifying and organizing. Teach students that classifying means breaking objects into groups by like characteristics. Tell them that organizing means putting objects into a logical order. Have the students work in groups of four. They should take 20 Post-it Notes per group and write the names of animals on them. Then they can classify the sPost-it Notes. Once a teacher checks it they can move the Post-it Notes and organize those same words.

Step 4: Day 4: Hypotheses. Teach students that making a hypothesis means making an educated guess about what will happen in an experiment based on background information. Show students several cans of sodas (have both some diet and some regular...I use about 8 different brands and mix them up half and half). Show students one of the sodas. Ask them to make a hypoethesis about what will happen to the soda if we put it in a bucket of water. Divide the board into two halves: sink and float. Students should put their Post-it Notes in the appropriate column. Their names should be on a note. Call on a random student in each group and ask them why they made their hypothesis (emphasizing that it is an EDUCATED guess NOT a random guess). Let a student put the soda can in the water. Let the students record what happened. Then pick up another can of students and repeat this process. In the end the diet sodas will float and the regular soda cans will sink. This is because of all of the sugar in regular soda that causes regular soda to be more dense. At the end of the activity let students create theories about why they think that some sodas float and others sink. See if they can get to the real answer.

Step 5: Day 5: Model buildings- Teach students the difference between 2d models (maps, diagrams) and 3d models (globes, etc)