P.O.E

Predict Observe Explain

This is a POE Example

Predict, Observe, Explain – Growing Mould

by Deb on March 5, 2010

This is the good thing about science – you get to do all the things you usually don’t admit to, but on purpose!  Growing mould is really simple and safe if you keep it in a sealed container, and it was a great opportunity for a case study on using Predict, Observe, Explain as a framework and to see how much my big girl (4) could do.

Method:

1. Get a variety of foods, we used bread, mandarin, cauliflower, cheese and yoghurt just because that’s what we had available.
2. Put them in a container you can seal and throw away, I thought it was a good time to break out the collection of empty jars.
3. Sprinkle in some water and leave them open for a while (half an hour or so) to let them collect some spores.  There are spores everywhere, it doesn’t mean your house is unhygienic!
4. Seal them and leave them in a nice warm place to grow, check them every few days.
5. After the mould has grown, throw them out without opening them – if you open them it will spread mould spores everywhere.

Predict:

What do you think is going to happen?

They’re going to be green.

Do you think they’ll all be the same?

Yes.

Why?

I think they’ll grow some mould. (Unfortunately I’d already told her the day before we could grow some mould, so she was remembering here.)

Observe:

She drew diagrams of each container and we talked about them.  She made all decisions on colours etc by herself.  Drawing what you see is extremely hard.  We all tend to draw what we know is there – think about little kids’ drawings of dogs that have 4 legs sticking out to the sides.  It doesn’t look like a dog, but they know it should have 4 legs so they put them in.  Or stereotypical drawings of the sun with rays coming out, or blue water.  So for any age, drawing what you see in front of you is a really good exercise to get the brain working.

She chose the greeny colour to be white, I have no idea why!

I drew the mandarin slices at her request, then she put the “sticky out seeds” in.

Not much happened to the cauliflower, I was surprised.

“This is to show that it’s all wibbly and moves around.”  She decided how to show that the yoghurt was very liquid.

“The black is where it’s all fluffy up the top.”  The green is where the little one decided to help too!

[Non-science based proud Mummy moment:  After she'd done the drawings she decided to write her explanations too.  While she was talking about the cheese she said "Be-cause ..." and wrote a B (bottom middle).  Completely unprompted.]

Explain:

What do you think the white stuff is?

Maybe it has turned into a soft white ball.  But some of it’s yucky and black.

Why do you think the seeds came out of the mandarin?

The seeds came out because we put water in.

What happened to the cheese?

Because of the mould.  It’s water but it’s yellow.

Did the cheese make it yellow?

The cheese melted, that’s why it’s yellow.  And the white fluffy stuff is like foam.  It’s the mould.

Conclusion:

The POE framework worked really well, she enjoyed doing all the different parts and seeing it through.  She was very excited to see what had happened to them and thought drawing them was great fun. I was impressed at how well she represented what she could see and the abstract thinking for the yoghurt.

Coming up with her own explanations didn’t worry her – most of them didn’t really explain, but having a go was the most important bit here.  Getting kids to think of their own ideas rather than asking for answers from you is more important than learning about mould!  And all her ideas were relevant and appropriate – we did put water in the mandarin, the cheese did melt.  So she’s making connections between her predictions, what we did, general knowledge and what happened.  Technically that’s synthesis, and it’s a high level of thinking.