One day second grader Miranda said: “I was in the garden looking at the tomatoes with Patrice and Josh, and we saw a wasp tackling a fly. Then it tore the fly’s head off and flew away with the body. An ant found the head and started eating it and the fly’s eyes separated from its head.”
The teacher asked, “What did you think about when you were watching this happen?”
She replied, “I thought, this is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and I wouldn’t want to be that fly.”
Later that same afternoon Sasha and Kate joined in the insect hunt and Kate said, “The garden seems to be so calm when you first look at it but when you look closer it’s very alive.”
On another day first graders found the front half of a dead snake and immediately started generating hypotheses as to what happened: Continue reading