I attended a training class and a science coach shared an activity that he does with his students to help them differentiate between observations, inferences, and predictions. He puts a picture on the interactive white board as a warm up (he gets the pictures from a variety of sources but uses National Geographic's Picture of the Day a lot). The picture above is from the National Geographic site. He has the students make five observations. Then he makes the students make five inferences. Finally he has the students make five predictions. He does this every day and it really drives home the difference between those three key inquiry vocabulary terms. I've done this activity with both my sixth and fourth grade science classes and the students really got into it and became proficient at telling me the difference between those terms.
Comments
If you cut and paste this website into your tool bar you can watch a short video. http://www.google.com/sites/help/intl/en/overview.html
Below the video you can see a classroom sample.
I haven't done much playing around, other then to start sharing files, but plan to soon.
Eve
By the way, the last page in your starter pages file, says science contact. I assumed you meant contract.
Eve
Hope things are going well for you in school.
Eve