Eggs, Eggs Everywhere
Emily
Crumley, Johnathon Sample & April
Zapata
| Description |
| Concept Map |
| Assessment Plan |
| Rubric |
| Calendar |
| Resources |
| Lesson Plan 1 |
| Lesson Plan 2 |
| Lesson Plan 3 |
| Orientation Video |
| Clinical Interviews |
| Modifications |
| Elementary Science Methods Home |
Clinical Interviews
Interview 1, Interview 2, Interview 3
Interviewee is a 6 year old girl during the summer between kindergarten and first grade.
Q) Ok Reagan, what’s an egg?
A) It’s a little, it’s something that a chicken lays and a bunch of things lay it and it’s something that chickens hatch out of and people eat it and it’s a little round thing that has a little yellow center that’s round and the little yellow center is called a yolk. And that’s all I have for egg.
Q) What about those other animals that come out of eggs, what are some other animals that come out of eggs?
A) Octopuses and turkeys gooses ducks, flamingoes, um
Q) You mentioned a goose and a duck and a flamingo and a chicken. So if you had to lump all of those animals into a category, what would it be?
A) Um, I don’t know
Q) Well what’s the same about all of those animals?
A) They all lay eggs and they all come out of eggs.
Q) But a little bit more than that, what kind of animal is a chicken?
A) A bird.
Q) What about a goose?
A) A bird.
Q) What about a duck?
A) A bird
Q) What about a flamingo?
A) A bird. They’re all birds
Q) Ok, what about the octopus?
A) The octopus, um, I don’t know.
Q) Where does an octopus live?
A) In the ocean.
Q) What other kinds of animals live in the ocean?
A) Sharks, whales, killer whales, dolphins, that’s my mom’s favorite animal, seahorse, that’s my favorite animal that lives in the ocean
Q) Do they lay eggs?
A) I don’t know if they lay eggs or if they just like have babies, I can’t tell. I think they lay eggs.
Q) All of them?
A) Um, some, some don’t.
Q) Which ones do you think do lay eggs?
A) Um.
Q) Let’s see, you said a shark, seahorse, whale, killer whale and dolphin. Which ones do you think lay eggs?
A) A dolphin doesn’t lay eggs. It’s kind of; I think a dolphin is a mammal. Sharks don’t lay eggs, um killer whales don’t lay eggs, whales don’t lay eggs and I think seahorses do.
Q) Ok, why don’t you think sharks lay eggs?
A) Because they’re about the same as dolphins and they don’t, and they don’t it’s just something that makes me think that sharks don’t lay eggs.
Q) What makes you think that they don’t, what about them?
A) Well, they look like they don’t lay eggs, and their just like really weird creatures, I can’t tell.
Q) What kind of animal do you think a shark is?
A) Mammal.
Q) What about fish? Do fish lay eggs?
A) Yes
Q) What about turtles?
A) Turtles do lay eggs.
Q) And what did you call the animals that don’t come out of eggs?
A) Mammals.
Q) Ok. And can you name some other groups of animals that come out of eggs? Like before you said birds.
A) Turtles come out of eggs, seahorses come out of eggs, I know caterpillars come out of eggs, um, octopuses come out of eggs.
Q) So what about a group of animals. The big category is birds, that’s one of the groups. Like chickens are birds, geese are birds, parakeets are birds (this digressed into my not wanting to buy birds because they went in cages, so I scrapped this question and went onto another one.).
Q) What about when they hatch? How does an egg hatch?
A) It gets cracks in it and the animal starts, I know that birds start pecking on it so that they can get out and what helps them get out is called an egg tooth and I think octopuses use their legs and they start spinning around and then it hits the egg and then it breaks so they can come out.
Q) Where do the eggs come from?
A) It comes from the animal that comes out of it.
Q) The parent animal?
A) The parent, yeah.
Q) From the mom or the dad?
A) The mom.
Q) Does the mom help the egg hatch?
A) Some do and some don’t. I know fishes don’t, they just lay the eggs and then go away. Octopuses I think stay and help the eggs hatch. I think seahorses stay for their eggs to protect them and help them hatch.
Q) What about chickens?
A) They do. All birds help their eggs hatch except for ostriches. They’re kind of jerks about having their eggs hatch. Because they just kind of like lay their eggs and then they’re like, doo doo doo, oh look, I laid an egg, should I protect it? No, maybe I can just let it die and let it rot.
Q) Where did you get that idea of ostriches?
A) I know it because I went to this farm, Crow’s Nest farm and all the ostriches there they don’t like eggs their kind of pains in the neck about keeping their egg safe because all of the nests that had eggs and nothing was protecting it and all of the ostriches was running around and they’re real fast and ostriches are in races.
Q) Oh, in races?
A) Yeah, they’re about the fastest birds in the whole entire planet.
Q) What are some animals that do protect their eggs?
A) Um, some birds, but not ostriches. They’re stupid and (almost the same conversation from earlier about the parenting techniques of ostriches).
Q) What about the other animals, what do they do to protect their eggs?
A) They fight and they stay on their nest, they don’t let anything happen to their eggs. They’re like, “I’m not gonna let anybody touch my eggs. I’m just gonna let them hatch, let them run around, but I’m still gonna take care of them.
Q) Why do you think they sit on the nest? Is it just for protection or does it do something else?
A) It has the babies so they stay warm and it doesn’t freeze to death and they can feel when it’s hatching because they can feel the pointing on their bottom.
Q) Do you know what it’s called when they’re keeping them warm?
A) Um, I think it’s protection.
Q) There’s another word for it when it’s just the warmth part, do you know what it is?
A) No I don’t know what that word is?
Q) It’s called incubation. They incubate them.
A) Incubation.
Q) What happens when an egg hatches?
A) The parent is surprised and happy and it means that it survived and if it’s a bird it starts to fly and if it’s a duck it starts to swim and it goes off to its normal habitat.
Q) What about the eggs that don’t hatch? What do the birds do with them? Or any other animals that have eggs?
A) They just like let it go. They just let it stay there and rot. And then if it gets broken and starts to smell, then if it’s an ostrich it runs away real quick, and it means that the baby died.
Q) Why do you think that some animals lay eggs and some animals don’t lay eggs?
A) Because God just made them that way.
Q) Do you think it might go a little bit deeper than that?
A) Cause mammals would be weird if they layed eggs and a platypus is real weird because it has fur, webbed feet, duck head, duck bill, that weird beaver tail and it lays eggs.
(talked a little about echidnas)
Q) What do we do with eggs?
A) We eat them.
Q) Is that all?
A) No, we take care of them. We put them in that thing with the light bulb and then they hatch. They make projects, like a first grade class. They find an egg with nothing to take care of it they put in the thing with the light bulb, and wait and wait and wait and then one day it hatches.
Q) What’s the light for?
A) For keeping it warm and making the egg get lots and lots of warm stuff in it and then it hatches.
Q) So does it keep it warm like the mom would do?
A) Yeah.
Q) Do you remember that word we talked about earlier that means keeping it warm?
A) No.
Q) Not at all?
A) No.
Q) Incubation. That’s what the light does.
Q) So you said that we eat eggs. Are there other animals that eat eggs?
A) When there was dinosaurs there used to be little dinosaurs that would steal the eggs and eat the eggs.
Q) So dinosaurs layed eggs too?
A) Yep.
Q) What about other animals, do they eat eggs?
A) Um yeah, but I don’t know which.
Q) Then why do you think that they do?
A) Because there’s a lot of things that replaced the dinosaurs. Like the giraffe replaced the longneck, I don’t remember what replaces t-rex.
Q) What do you mean by replaces it?
A) Replace means that there’s something and it gets ruined, and it gets replaced by something else.
Q) So the longnecks got ruined so they were replaced with giraffes?
A) Yeah, cause the world got covered with a bunch of dust and everything died, nothing survived. And humans, I think the word might be evaporated
Q) I think the word might be evolved.
A) Yeah, evolved, and monkeys evolved a bunch into humans.
Q) Where do the giraffes fit in with that?
A) I don’t know.
Q) Do giraffes lay eggs?
A) (Laughs) No!
Q) How come?
A) Because their mammals.
Q) What makes it a mammal?
A) It has a lots and lots of hair and it has babies and it doesn’t have to sit on them to have them. It’s just hot blooded.
Q) Are you sure a shark is a mammal?
A) Yeah.
Q) Do you know what kind of animal a shark is?
A) No, I just know it’s a mammal.
Q) Well, a shark is a really big fish. It is, I promise. So is it still a mammal?
A) I think.
Q) What about other fish, are they mammals?
A) A dolphin’s a mammal.
Q) Is a dolphin a fish?
A) Yes.
Q) What about a goldfish?
A) It’s just a fish.
Q) What about a stingray, what is that?
A) I think it lays eggs.
Q) So would that be a mammal or not a mammal?
A) Not a mammal.
Q) Well a ray is also a kind of shark.
A) I didn’t know that.
Q) And they do lay eggs, they’re really weird looking. (I drew her a picture and we had a conversation about how weird they look).
Q) So earlier when you were describing eggs you said they were round, are all eggs round?
A) No.
Q) What other shapes are they?
A) Square, oval, round, kind of blobby.
Q) What has a blob egg?
A) I don’t know. I just, there’s eggs that are little blobs.
Q) Where did you learn about those eggs?
A) Animal Planet. I watch Animal Planet a lot.
Q) And it didn’t say what kind of animals layed them?
A) No.
Q) What about bugs, do they lay eggs?
A) Yes.
Q) All of them?
A) I think.
Q) Your right, they do.
Q) What about spiders?
A) They make a little egg sac to hold their eggs in. It’s called an egg sac.
Q) Where do animals keep their eggs?
A) In a nest.
Q) All of them?
A) No, butterflies keep their eggs on a leaf. I only know that butterflies keep their eggs on a leaf.
Q) Well, you just told me something about spiders.
A) Oh, they have the egg sac in a corner.
Q) What about a fish.
A) I don’t know. I know that octopus keep their eggs in a little thing that hangs and it has eggs in it.
Q) In the water or on the land?
A) In the water.
Q) What about a turtle?
A) It buries its eggs under the sand and the sand is green when the leatherback turtle comes to bury its eggs on land.
Q) Did you learn all of this off Animal Planet?
A) Uh, yeah. I watch Animal Planet a lot.
Q) Can you think of any other things about eggs we didn’t talk about?
A) No.
Q) Well, before you said that the egg had a yolk in it, which it does, you’ve seen it, but also eggs hatch. So how does it go from being wet with a yolk to being an animal?
A) Like it gets made in the animal’s body and this weird liquid gets stuck in it and the baby animal somehow gets packed into it.
Q) Tell me more about how the baby animal gets packed in it.
A) Somehow, I just know somehow it gets packed in it.
Q) What do you mean by packed in it?
A) It kind of gets sucked into the egg.
Q) So, there was a baby animal outside of the egg and then it got sucked into the egg?
A) Mmhmm.
Q) Well where was it before it got sucked into the egg?
A) In the tummy.
Q) Ok, so you mean it gets sucked into the egg while the eggs still inside?
A) Yeah.
Q) Ok. Do you want to talk about eggs anymore or are you done?
A)
I’m getting’ bored.
Analysis
There were more questions that I would have liked to ask Reagan. For instances she really never hit on lizards (aside from dinosaurs) or snakes hatching from eggs. I could have led her in this direction, now that I reread the interview, but the directions that she was going in seemed interesting as far as conceptual understanding. She had a strong grasp on the fact that mammals do not lay eggs, and some of the attributes belonging to mammals. However there were animals that she incorrectly categorized. She could not have a shark not be a mammal, because it is so similar in appearance to dolphins. On the other hand, due to the similarity, a dolphin was a fish.
I think that the Eggs, Eggs Everywhere guide could probably be more beneficial if it was taught around the same time as lessons about what makes a mammal a mammal, what makes a bird a bird, etc. The fact that she did already have this knowledge base made it easier to categorize which animals came from eggs and which didn’t. The misconception of the shark and the dolphin isn’t something that I feel will stick around for too much longer. I addition to watching a lot of Animal Planet, sharks and dolphins are both animals that tend to fascinate small children, and when given more facts about them I feel that they will probably readily accepted. In fact, after the interview I explained to her that a shark is a fish and not a mammal and she seemed fine with it.
Her other, most glaring misconception was the question of how an egg develops. The GEM guide is for preschool through 1st grade. Reagan is in the summer between kinder and 1st grade. She mentioned the experiment that the 1st graders do; getting an unmothered egg and hatching it in the classroom. More than likely this experiment will be supplemented with research and explanation of how the egg develops. Once this is explained, I wouldn’t expect the baby animal getting sucked into the egg theory to hold on too much longer. This was also something that she didn’t seem like she had thought about before. Her theory was reasonable to her, but I don’t think that it is something that she is very attached to. I hope.
She also had a slightly bastardized theory of evolution. I seem to remember that as being a fairly common one, and much of it may have come from hearing “people came from monkeys.” She certainly doesn’t disbelieve it, but it seems like a misconception that will be open to the truth.
Clinical Interview 2: Leslie: Age 8
Q: Do you know what an egg is?
A: Yes.
Q: Can you describe an egg to me?
A: Umm…I don’t know
Q: Have you ever seen a real egg?
A: Yes
Q: Where did you see a real egg?
A: In my refrigerator.
Q: Have you seen a real egg anywhere else?
A: No
Q: What do you know about eggs? What can you do with them?
N: You can eat them.
Q: Where do eggs come from?
A: Chickens
Q: How do chickens get out of the eggs?
A: I don’t know
Q: Have you ever seen a real live chicken? Where?
A: Yes, on a field trip. We went to a farm and we saw chickens.
Q: What do the chickens do on the farm?
A: They lay eggs.
Q: What other animals do you know of come from eggs?
A: Turtles, snakes
Q: Do they hatch the same way?
A: Yes
Q: Are all eggs the same size?
A: No, Ostrich eggs are bigger
Q: Do all eggs look the same?
A: No, they have kinda different colors
Q: Where do animals lay their eggs?
A: Turtles in the sand, chickens hatch them in their nest and fish in the water
Q: Can animals lay their eggs in the water or in the sand? Does it matter?
A: Yes, fish have to have them in the water because they will die on dry land.
Analysis
I was very surprised to find that Leslie knew a lot about eggs and where they come from. I think initially Leslie was hesitant to answer questions for me because she didn’t know me that well. After sitting down with me she began to go a little more in depth with her answers.
I had a misconception that Leslie would not know where eggs come from, what animals come from and the variety of animals that come from eggs. I was even surprised to find that she knew the range of sizes between eggs. For example when she said that an ostrich egg would be larger than other eggs.
I do think that Leslie may need a better understanding of the different uses of eggs. While she mentioned that you can eat eggs and that she had seen them in her refrigerator, she never mentions that eggs can also grown into chickens. This may have been her lack of knowledge or my failure to probe her for further questioning on that subject.
The Eggs, Eggs Everywhere GEMS guide does not cover the topic of egg uses; however one lesson plan involves children exploring with a live chicken. At this point the teacher could include discussion on additional uses and the development of chickens.
Norma is an eleven year old female and will enter the 6th grade in the fall of 2009. She was interviewed about the topic of eggs for a project in CI 5329 on June 21, 2009.
Interviewer: “Norma thank for talking to me today. We’re going to be discussing the topic of eggs. So think about for a moment all of the things that you know about eggs, and don’t worry there isn’t a test afterwards so just tell me as much as you know.”
Student: “Ok.”
Interviewer: “So tell me what you know about eggs.”
Student: “You can eat them. They are white. You have to cook them before you eat them. They come from chickens.”
Interviewer: “Do they only come from chickens?”
Student: “No, they come from lots of animals, like birds, ducks, ostrich. Oh, and there are brown eggs too, not just white ones.”
Interviewer: “What do eggs do? What is the purpose of them?”
Student: “They turn into animals. First they are hatched then they turn into baby animals.”
Interviewer: “So do you know how many eggs are usually laid at a time?”
Student: “Chickens are laid one at a time. I’m not sure about other animals.”
Interviewer: “And how often do chickens have eggs?”
Student: “Probably about three eggs per every seven days.”
Interviewer: “Do any other animals lay eggs? Maybe animals that live in the water?”
Student: “Yea fish have eggs too.”
Interviewer: “You’ve already told me that there are different colors of eggs, are there different sizes too?”
Student: “Yes.”
Interviewer: “Which animals have the biggest eggs and which have the smallest.”
Student: “Um, probably birds like ostriches have the biggest, and I don’t know, fish have the smallest.”
Interviewer: “Is there anything else that you know about eggs?”
Student: “No.”
Interviewer: “Ok. Thank you for your help, and have a great summer!”
Student: “You’re welcome.”