BMS: Magic School Bus - 7th Grade Science/English

At BMS each year Science and English are integrated in a special interdisciplinary project where students create a children's book on a science concept modeled after the Magic School Bus series by Joana Cole and published by Scholastic. Today I was fortunate to be in Kimberly Materese's 7th grade Science class held in a computer lab, but you might have thought it was an English class, or maybe an Art class, or possibly a Technology or Library Media class. Wait a minute! It was!

Students were working on the story and layout of their children's book on computers, and each book focused on a specific science topic, such as gravity, Pluto, meteors, black holes, and others. (See topic list below.) In English class students worked on their nonfiction story to entertain and teach others about their science topic. Students were using their checklists and rubrics to self-assess their book. They were extremely excited and proud of their work. All students were focused on last minute efforts to perfect the mechanics, content, story and art work of their book, since the project is due tomorrow, April 9th.

Rita Hennessey, LMS, was also working with students on many aspects of their project, including the use of Noodletools to create a thorough Works Cited page for every book.

Thanks to Mrs. Matarese, here are the rubrics, checklists and other documents used for this project:

• The Magic School Bus Science book revised 08-09.doc
  
• Timeline and checklist.doc
  
• Magic School Bus Topics.doc
  
• Rubric-Science.doc
  
• Rubric-English.doc

... and a sample page from Matt and Jeremy's book on Gravity...

Play with the Solar System

This website allows users to view the movement of the planets over ANY period of time.
Users can control:

• the speed of time passing -- both forward and backward
• the angle of viewing the solar system
• the distance from planets
• the measurements in Astronomical Units, Kilometers or Miles between any two objects
• the playing of existing tours and the creation of their own tours
• and much more!

For an unusual tour of our solar system, check out this website:
http://www.gunn.co.nz/astrotour/

Take the introductory tour to learn some of the shortcuts (such as press the + or - keys to zoom in or out; use your left mouse click to move the solar system around; hold the shift key down while you move the solar system and rotate the entire solar system on an axis).