Week 8

Week in Review

Monday

Monday we tested the cement Hockey Pucks we created on Friday. Unfortunately it was a cold and windy day but I told them "It's always a good day to go outside and smash stuff." I really enjoyed this lab because it was a direct application of why its important to reinforce bridges, foundations, and walls.

After reflecting on our results students were given the following choice.  Choice A - work on study guide during the rest of class, finish for homework, and then do review games tomorrow or Choice B - work on study guide in class, no homework, and then finish individually tomorrow but probably without time for review games.

To my surprise 2 of my 3 regular classes choice Choice A and the other chose Choice B.  Looks like students aren't as afraid of homework as I thought. Or they just love games.

Tuesday

Today two of my Choice A classes played Trasketball (thank you Mrs. Wyrick). After checking study guides against my key they sat in groups of four with a whiteboard and marker in the middle of the table. Each student in a group was given a number (1, 2, 3, 4).  I read a question from the study guide then yelled out a number.  For example "Give an example of a chemical change.....#3!" Only the student whose number I called could write on the whiteboard and hold it up (other group members could give feedback as the student wrote).  First whiteboard with a correct answer got a chance to shoot either a 1 point, 2 point, 3 point, or 5 point (back against the far wall) shot.  Teams only receive points if they made it. Teams could also lose points if they didn't clap after everyone's shot. Good times.

One of the Choice A classes had half of their class come to class with incomplete study guides. You reap what you sow. That class spent the rest of the class finishing their study guides and checking keys individually.

The Choice B class spent the period in a similar manner but without the penalty for late homework.

Wednesday

The sky fell in.

All of my regular-paced classes took their Unit 3 test on D2L. At least they were supposed too....

When my first class came in, they logged on to D2L and attempted to access the test. Instead they received this message:

You've got to be kidding me.

The next 10 minutes were a blur of making paper copies (since I was trying to avoid killing the rain forests I only had my teacher copy of the test), students constructing answer keys on their own paper, and me convincing students they would have plenty of time to finish their test today (which they did).

To our Tech Department's credit, I was on the phone within 10 minutes talking to Matt and Jennifer, 2 of our ITF (instructional technology facilitators) folk, and they went to work immediately for me. Looks like the error wasn't on our end of things, it was a D2L server error that was corrected within 24 hours. Keep it classy D2L corporate.

Thursday

To kick start our new unit on energy, students brought in small appliances/tools from home. We spread them around the room and students rotated through the stations answering 2 questions: What job does it perform? What energy is needed for it to work?  The questions were completely open-ended and were aimed to access prior knowledge at how we get the devices of our life to function.  

Their answers were pretty great because they weren't influenced by the sophistication of science textbooks/notes.  For instance, a kid brought in a huge socket wrench (I mean HUGE. It was the size of my forearm and upper arm) and kids argued it needed "Force Energy" or "Push-Pull Energy."  What a great starting place.

The above picture is a shot I took of my whiteboard at the end of one of the classes. Notice the definitions for energy in the black pen on the bottom right of the screen.  These are all student-constructed responses they did at their tables as the final part of the stations activity.

Every definition is a pretty great derivation of the textbook answer --> "Energy is the ability to do work" or "Energy is the ability to affect change."  I love that my students were able to construct their own working definition based on their prior knowledge and group experience from the activity, and their definitions are essentially the same as the one I would have given them.

Friday

On Friday students read an article and filled out a graphic organizer. The article was a great piggyback to the stations activity from Thursday because it gave scientific names to the processes they had talked about during the stations. For instance, during the stations activity students had described "push/pull" as an energy needed by objects. The article relabeled that energy as "Kinetic Energy - Mechanical."  This article supplies the vocabulary for the next two weeks.

Lessons Learned

1. Backup Plan - It paid to have a paper copy of the test on test day.  Though it was a pain (and stressful) to run to the copy room to make a quick set of 35 copies, it wasn't near as stressful as not having a paper copy at all! Lesson - things will always fail when you need it most. 

Week 7

Week in Review

Monday-Wednesday

This was a crazy-fun week for 8th science as conducted one of our most rigorous inquiry labs of the year - the CSI Mystery Lab on Who killed Dr. Todd?

Was it the belittled custodian? the crazy shop teacher? the ambitious assistant principal? the pernicious nurse? or the samurai social studies teacher?

A mysterious white powder was found on the lapel of Dr. Todd's suit and coincidentally(?) all suspects had white powders around their person when questioned about the murder.  8th grade science students were employed to help solve the case.

On the first day students made a grid of the physical and chemical properties of  5 powders - salt, sugar, corn starch, baking soda, and talc.  They examined the powders response to heat (sugar carmelizes), to water (talc beads the water off), to iodine (corn starch turns black), and to vinegar (baking soda bubbles). They also looked at the particles' structure under a microscope (salt is really cubed and really cool).

 

On the second day students were given samples of the powders found on all 5 suspects.  Each suspect's powder was a mixture of 2 of the white powders and students had to examine the physical and chemical properties of each suspect to see which powder they matched up with, and ultimately, which powder matched the incriminating powder found on Dr. Todd's lapel.

On the third day students sat trouble and did the difficult work of making sure they correctly matched the characteristics of each suspect's powder to the correct base powder.   I loved this day because it was an opportunity for higher order thinking and rigorous retesting. Students had to deduce why their powder's characteristics weren't matching up, then go back and conduct further tests, deduce again, perhaps retest, over and over and over again.  

Most of the time I don't feel like I'm hitting a home run with rigor and relevance. Most of the time  I feel like I'm preparing students for an end of unit or high-stakes test but this week was different. This lab was all about giving a challenging, fun, collaborative assignment that mimicked real life criminal justice lab work.  I felt like I was preparing students to work in "life after school" and this was a great example of how "real science" involves doing multiple tests and trials again.... and again..... and again.  Thank you Ashley Shaw for introducing me to this lab last year.

P.S. It was the pernicious nurse if you were wondering. 

Thursday-Friday

Crazy lab week. These two days we conducted our final lab on the properties of substances and we made hockey pucks of cement.  We did this because we talked about how engineers have discovered they need to reinforce concrete with different fibers because though concrete has great compressive strength it is lacking shear and tensile strength. If we didn't reinforce concrete then all the walls would come a tumblin' down during earthquakes.

The challenge: create the strongest hockey puck using any combination of 5 fibers (tooth picks, pipe cleaner, yarn, cotton balls, or string).

 

We're letting them harden over the weekend and then we'll be testing them by smashing them on the sidewalk on Monday and seeing which one has the fewest cracks forming.

Lessons Learned

1. Technology - sometimes when you're a pilot FLiP room you dont' use your laptops all week. And that's ok.
2. Wrong Answers- I had many students get the wrong results on the CSI Lab. And I think that's ok.  One of the best quotes I've ever heard about learning is "Learning is a long, slow, continuous conversation that takes time."  We just started the conversation. 

Week 6

Week in Review

Ability Grouping

This week has been even more crazy than last week. Thanks to ability grouping my classes I now have three different pacing groups among my five 8th grade science classes.  I have a 3 "high" periods who are clipping through lessons, my "medium" class who is sometimes one period behind the high or is at the same place, and one "low" class who is now two periods behind the others.

What am I doing differently with the low group? Well, now instead of having a class with a smattering of students who are consistently getting D/F's on an assessment I now have them all in one class. For example, here are the results of last week's quiz.

Class Averages

Periods	Quiz 3.1 A
High	80%
High	83%
High	82%
Med	73%
Low	58%

There is a 20%+ point discrepancy between my high and low classes. So I did what any teacher would do when their class average was an F - remediate and reassess.  The day after quizzes were returned and reviewed I utilized whiteboards and D2L item analysis to help students review key terms and concepts missed on the quiz. Students then made a study guide to review at home and re-assessed Quiz 3.1  on the following day using an alternative form of the quiz.  Here are the results:

Class Averages

Periods	Quiz 3.1	Re-assessed Quiz 3.1
High	80%
High	83%
High	82%
Med	73%
Low	58%	76%

I was EXTREMELY pleased with the results.  I'm less excited about their grades increasing and more excited about the possibility that the increased class average may indicate they've learned something!  Last quarter students had the option to come in on their own time to review and re-assess but typically the low-achieving students weren't motivated to do it on their own.  By having them all together in a class its allowed me to differentiate the pacing for their class and slow everything down.

Monday

For my high classes, we watched a YouTube screencast I made last year and set our notebooks up for tomorrow's lab.  I really appreciated having a repository of videos I began making last year with Screencastomatic. 

watch screencast here

Tuesday

Tuesday we performed a States of Matter Lab where students investigated the effect of salt on water's freezing point. Super practical, super fun.

The beaker on the right has salt, the beaker on the left is plain water.  We stirred each ice water slurry with a spoon for 2-3 minutes and then recorded the temps on a class GoogleDoc.

Our team was able to get the salt-water slurry down to -5 Celsius and we were able to get condensation of normal water on the outside of the glass beaker to freeze and form a crust around the beaker. In fact some groups were able to get temps of -10, -12, -15 Celsius.  Pretty cool.

Students entered their data on the projected GoogleDoc during class time. I like having the spreadsheet projected after students hypothesize in order for them to self-check their data. As I observed them during the lab they would keep looking up at the board to see if their numbers were matching everyone else's and I even heard one or two groups saying, "What did we do wrong? I don't want to put our numbers up there. It'll make us outliers."  Score.

Wednesday

Dry Ice Day.  Students love it. Teachers love it.  So much to explore - density of the vapor, sublimation vs evaporation, different freezing temps for different substances, how the dry ice makes a cloud by condensing water, the transfer of heat from a vibrating quarter, etc...  We played for 15 minutes then summarized what we learned in our science notebooks.

Josh? or Santa Claus?

Dry Ice bubbles - so cool!

Thursday & Friday

Thursday and Friday I was out of the classroom at the district office as part of a panel for new website vendors.  I'm thankful my students are already trained in using D2L that they were able to accomplish essentially the same lesson I would have done if I was in the classroom.   They went to the agenda for each day and worked their way down (see pic below).

Students took a Practice Quiz 3.2 on Thursday and checked the Practice Quiz Key with the sub. The point of a practice quiz in my class is to review basic terms and concepts they should have learned throughout the week.  Very lower level Bloom's. Then on Friday they took Quiz 3.2 where I ask application, summarizing, and extension type questions to test their knowledge of those basic terms.  The Quiz was on D2L and I was able to grade their short answers pretty quick.

And I learned how to make D2L technicolor.. See Graphical Unit Headers Tutorial on the right sidebar of the blog

Lessons Learned

1. Ability Grouping. Seeing positive results so far from my low period. New leaders are emerging in the class and several were extremely happy we were going to take a whole class period to review and reassess rather than making them come in on their own time. This furthers my belief that it is NOT stigmatizing to group students by ability. They already know if they need more time with things, and they appreciate receiving extra time.  Especially when there are opportunities to switch between periods at determined points throughout the years if students begin demonstrating a pattern of success/growth.