Last week, my Grade 8 Science kids completed a lab to observe the characteristics of living things. In it, they compared dry yeast and salt, then put each into apple juice to observe the reactions. The first step in the lab was to describe the dry yeast and salt in a table, looking at the colour, size, texture, and shape of each. When I looked over the lab reports my kids had turned in, I was more than a little disappointed with their observations. I had more than half of the class simply writing the word "small" for size of the grains, and I even had about 5 or 6 kids write "salty" for the texture of the salt! This made me realize that I hadn't given them enough clarification on what was acceptable, scientific language for observations. To help them understand the level of description I wanted, we completed a simple activity. We went outside, and I asked each student to find a leaf. We have a beautiful maple tree that takes up a large ...