Last fall my students were studying the Water Cycle, so we transformed an aquarium into a water cycle in the classroom complete with evaporation and precipitation. Soon after they were doing Stream Team where they monitor the health of a local stream. While doing this they collected a small cutthroat trout in the stream bed sediments. Our aquarium didn't have any inhabitants so in went the trout.
Throughout the course of the year that trout has been incorporated into almost every unit we have studied in our science class. Along the way the students have borrowed my camera and taken A LOT of footage of the trout. For our simple machine unit the trout took center stage again as the object of their Rube Golberg Machine's mission. They set their machine up so they could turn the lights on in the morning and it would feed the trout! See the video on YouTube here.
I used a digital story map to guide editing of the huge amount of footage the students collected during the yearlong experience with the cutthroat trout. All though I already had the footage creating the map really helped me fine tune what story I wanted the movie to tell. The project was such a success other teachers in the district have asked for the movie to get their students working with simple machines.
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