Bio accumulation

Yesterday we took advantage of the nice weather and went outside to show how toxins can build up in different species. In the picture the salmon are running up "stream" while trying to avoid the herons that are picking them off.

Concrete lab

I like to add some helpful information and skills to labs that don't necessarily fall under the standards. Today that skill was creating concrete with the right water/cement ratio. Nearly everyone of them added way too much water. The main purpose of the lab was to create concrete that would harden not in 6-8 hours but closer to 24 hours by adding sugar to the cement. The sugar prevents a chemical reaction from occurring as quickly this slowing the hardening process. 

Element Webpage

This rubric is subject to change (a little). The content will remain the same, the formatting might be tweaked. Click here for the rubric.

Periodic table battleship

The students had fun playing periodic table battleship. It was meant to get them interacting with the table and becoming familiar with where things are located on it. They can call out their targets by element name or group#/period#. So far they are enjoying it without going overboard. 

Wind turbines

This was phase one of a larger lesson I hope to work on. Students were given basic materials that they could use to create a wind turbine. Next year I hope to get some money to buy little motors so they can actually create energy from their wind turbines to light up a little led or similar. I love projects that start with "this is sooooo easy" and quickly turn into "this is impossible, nothing works!" Something missing from these students (and countless others) is perseverance. The final designs that worked were not created by the academically best students, but they were created by students who tried, failed, revised, tried, failed, revised, and tried again. That willingness to continue to work and not just give up when it gets hard is difficult to teach so I was glad they were provided that space to fail and then keep working on their designs. Here are the designs that consistently spun and would not topple over when placed in front of the fan.

In the news!

We tried this for the first time this year. The lead up went shockingly well. As soon as a kid coughed someone else would be out of their seat with phone in hand to report it. The kids got their first real taste of trying to handle large sets of data and thinking about how best to sort and group.

http://www.newstopic.net/news/local/x1866990066/Using-tech-Gamewell-Middle-students-serve-as-disease-detectives

Zombie attack

This is one of the highlights of my year. It involves nearly everything I love about teaching. Physical activity, math, science, ethics, role playing, class generated data, and high engagement both during the lesson and in the subsequent write up. We start the model with a single zombie. Students must get food and water each "day" (30sec.). If the zombie tags you, you become a zombie at nightfall. We chart how quickly the zombie virus spreads. Then we play again but implementing a semi voluntary quarantine. Now the bitten can choose to quarantine themselves or not and become zombies. Finally we run it again with a vaccine present. The next day we graph, analyze, draw conclusions, and look at reasons why people refuse vaccinations and the results from that decision.  Two survivors left facing down the zombie horde.