First Day jitters

In 12 hours I will be in the middle of corralling students, going over endless amounts of paperwork, and doing my best to show the students it's going to be a good year. There will be 185 days of instruction this year, however there is only 1 first day.  This will be my 7th "first day" of school and I can assure you, I am jittery now, on the drive in it will be worse, there will be a slight calm before the storm where I assure myself I have everything together, then I will hear the incoming rush of feet pattering down the hall and it will all go out the window. I almost wonder why I meticulously plan for the first day, since it has never gone according the script. Which come to think about it, is how most of my days are.

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