The Daily Tomato

I should just start by saying that I've been thinking about the tomato. Not the process by which it breaks down but the process by which I would use this sort of activity with students. The fact that I'm thinking about this (or anything at all) is pretty exciting for me. So, despite my promise that the daily tomato would turn into the weekly tomato, I'm going to post about it again.

There are always two points of doing any science education activity: the content that will be gained and the process skills that students need to learn. In my world, they cannot be done without one another. There are also a few more aspects of each activity (such as building social skills, different types of literacies, etc) but for right now I want to focus on these two. We learn about the process of decay (the content)by watching , over time, the way that our tomato decays. You take what you see and try to explain what is going on. I did this my first year teaching and just had the kids match what they saw to pictures on line or in books. That's fine but its pretty low level thinking.

The real reason to do the daily tomato is to think about how just watching something break down (which we do all the time in our refrigerators) turns into making sense of the process in a scientific way. This means a lot of things but most of us have heard it as the scientific method. For me, that means thinking about what questions we have about the tomato.

So, I write about the tomato today to say that I noticed something different when I took the picture. It was raining and I thought "What does the weather, specifically moisture, have to do with the breakdown of the tomato". I also thought about the temperature, the location, the type of tomato, etc. From that initial question, I can do a better job of gathering data to refine my question and to make comparisons between this tomato rotting on a ledge and others out there. So thinking of questions and having them lead your thinking down a path is the first place that I start to do experiments with students and for some, its the way they start to explore the world scientifically.