Formative Assessment

Do students recognize these components of soil: minerals, organic matter and spaces filled with air or water?

As you look for evidence in students’ notebook entries, these questions can help you interpret their writing. Do students:

• recognize that there are spaces between the soil grains, filled with air or water?
• understand that these spaces are important components of soil?

When some of her students had difficulty imagining air spaces in a container of soil, here’s the next step one teacher took.