We’re All Made from the Same Stuff
FieldTrips for All of Us: Transformational Adventures for Children and Their Adults
Note: For now, this blog is a serialization of a book titled Field Trips for All of Us: Transformative Adventures for Children and Their Adults. Here is the preface. The first field trip is Taking Education Outside.
Introduction
I (Peter) organize everything I teach about nature science around three big ideas: (1) We are all remarkably similar, (2) We are all remarkably different, and (3) We are all in this together as members of a global ecosystem. All three of these ideas are expressed in the domain of chemistry. All living beings are made of similar stuff organized into similar general patterns. Our differences can be described in terms of how our stuff is organized and arranged into specific patterns. And, our interdependence shows up in our exchange of chemical materials and energy with each other. The study of chemistry begins with the idea that almost everything in the known universe is made from the same hundred basic building blocks. In this field trip, you and the child(ren) in your care will play with Lego bricks and demonstrate that vastly different things can be built from the same building blocks. What makes different things different if they’re built from the same materials? The specific patterns of spatial relationships between their building blocks!
Activity
This activity requires an identical set of Lego bricks for each participant or group of participants. The sets can include anywhere from twenty to a hundred pieces. I usually use a 30 piece bag. I pass out the bags and ask everyone to build whatever they want with only one rule: use only the pieces you were given and use all of them. I like to make sure the kids have as much time as they like to finish their projects and then invite them each to show-and-tell about what they’ve made. If it’s just you and one child, we encourage your child to show-and-tell first.
After show-and-tell, ask the child(ren)if their creations were made from the same building blocks. Ask them if their creations are similar . Check to see if they agree that different things can be made by arranging the same building blocks in different patterns of relationship.
Ask them to describe any differences between the various Lego pieces and whether those differences impact how they use a particular piece. If they don’t mention the number of connections (or number of nubs), ask them if there are any differences in how many other pieces you can attach to a specific piece.
Maybe talk with your kid(s) about what a model is. Ask them if a model house is the same as a real house. Ask about the difference between the two.
Some Science Stuff
Resist the temptation to memorize the following or to directly teach this material to the child(ren) you’re giving care to. These are just some ideas to think about. You might want to ask your older children to read it and to circle any words they don’t know.
A model is a thing that shares major features with another thing and is often smaller or simpler than the thing being modeled. Energy is the source of all action. If something is happening, energy is what makes it happen. Matter is what all stuff is made from. Elements like oxygen and iron are the basic materials that combine to form all regular matter in the universe. There are less than 100 naturally occurring elements. An atom is the smallest piece of an element that acts like that element. You can think of individual Lego pieces as the atoms of the Lego world. You can think of all of the red pieces with two nubs as being all of the atoms of an element in your set. Almost all of the atoms in our body are atoms of one of three types: Oxygen, Carbon, and Hydrogen. Molecules like water and carbon dioxide are two or more atoms bound together.
Educational Suggestions
Mechanisms are generally assembled one piece at a time. This factory-like pattern is played out in factory-like schools. Students are expected to completely master skills one at a time in an orderly sequential fashion. The best way to enforce this kind of learning is to present students with lots of opportunities to practice isolated skills (e.g., single-digit addition) on fragmented decontextualized tasks (a worksheet full of similar problems). Contrast this pedagogic methodology with how we learned to walk, talk, and become parents and/or educators. I (Peter) like to integrate the factory pattern of building a mechanism by completing the task of adding one piece before adding the next and the forest-like patterns of learning a little bit more about a thing each time you bump into it. The integration of these two patterns for guides like us is to do some planning about the order in which we explore topics and not to expect mastery until folks have bumped into an idea many times from many different viewpoints.
Wrap Up
Everything in the known universe is made of around one hundred types of basic building blocks. Those types are called elements. The smallest piece of an element that acts like that element is an atom. Understanding that all things are made of the same stuff is the beginning of the path toward understanding how all beings are remarkably similar, how all beings are remarkably different, and how we are all remarkably interdependent. It can also help us remember that while we often imagine ourselves to be unchanging chunks of matter, we are actually a patterned dynamic collection of atoms that we are constantly exchanging with our environment. Make sure to check out related field trips including synthesis and breakdown, the CHNOPS elements, and the marvelous relationship between photosynthesis and respiration that we discuss in the Fuel, Food, and Fire field trip.
A Scientist's View of the Sacred
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
Countless atoms on their way from somewhere to somewhere else.
Breath becomes trees,
becomes fruit,
becomes us.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.