2010
02.07
I have been trying to think on how to draw students in at the beginning of the unit. Science is just so COOL, students shouldn’t see it as boring or dry. This week a student asked me why in the world would I ever want to be an Earth Science teacher?? I was telling her about how fascinating I found it trying to interpret millions and millions of years of the Earth’s history based off of what we can see at the very surface and how sweet it is that we can see life preserved in the rock record from millions of years ago. She thought that was cool, but class wasn’t. I have been thinking since about the importance of sharing your excitement and the “coolness” of science with your students.
For example, my mom recently sent me an email with some brain teasers. This may not be relevant to Earth science, but the brain is so fascinating. Looking at some of these things are a good way to “hook” students into a unit on the nervous system and begin generating some interesting questions. Also, they are just fun, enjoy:
Olny srmat poelpe can raed tihs. I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!
Read out loud the text in the triangle below:
Did you say “a bird in the bush”? If so, you failed to see that the word “the” is repeated!
Which way is the woman spinning?
Apparently if she is spinning left, the left side of your brain is working (and vice versa)
Category Uncategorized |
2010
01.29
My dad gave me a copy of a book called “Making sense of secondary science” which he had to buy for a science education course that he took recently.
It goes through a lot of main science topics and tells you what misconceptions students of each age level often have about them. It’s basically a summary of a ton of research that has been done by many different people on the subject. I can bring it in if anyone want to check it out. It might be really useful to prepare yourself for potential misconceptions even before you APK.
You can check it out on Amazon here.
Tags: Share Resources Category Uncategorized |
2010
01.28
I feel like I am going to be very challenged this semester for getting my work done AND getting sleep… not to mention trying to stay healthy.
Maybe it’s just me, but my formal lesson plan write ups take me probably 2 hours if I am focused as I am working. Add to this actually planning and prepping a good lesson, creating valuable assessments, giving my students useful feedback, grading, making phone calls home, making myself available to my students after school…
Lets take a day in the life of Maeghan on Wednesdays… I’ll be getting to school at 7:15am and, with no after school, staying until 3pm. It’s a half hour drive back home. On Wednesdays I will barely have enough time to leave for my class in Honeoye Falls, and from there I go to Topics where we get out at 9:30 pm. If I get home by 9:45, with just the lesson plan write up, I will be working until 11:45pm, and that’s not even taking into account actually thoughtfully planning a lesson! I can’t see getting to bed before 1 or 2am, and then being up at 6am again the next day… Notice this schedule didn’t include any meals, gym time, mental breaks, or time spent with family or friends. Nor does it include grading, doing my own coursework, or be available to my students after school.
I guess I’m at a loss on how to possibly stay physically and mentally healthy with this type of schedule. I’m also worried about what kind of teacher I will be to my students on only 3 or 4 hours of sleep with no decompress time. I’m also worried if I’ll even be a teacher Inext year if I don’t have time to work on my resume, look for jobs, interview, or study for my cert exams!
I have a feeling our March Madness this spring will have nothing to do with basketball…
Tags: Rant Category Uncategorized |
2010
01.10
I am doing a 5-day project with my students, and am using a website that helps you set up a “webquest”
It’s www.zunal.com
It’s really easy to make a site for an online project, and is letting me go “paperless” as well as letting the students do the teaching for our next unit on cell processes.
Here’s the one I made
Tags: Share Resources Category Uncategorized |
2009
12.03
This was the Thursday of STARS. I can’t believe how fast the time has gone. We were all at East to prepare our final presentations. Unfortunately, only one of our girls from FS was able to come to East today, but we were happy to have her. We started our poster construction today because we wanted it to really be co-constructed from our whole teams (though we did have the girls make Powerpoint slides and graphs in previous weeks.
The East team had 3 girls today. It was a little difficult having only one girl from FS because she got a little excluded from the girl’s conversations (it didn’t help that one of the East girls mentioned how much she hated FS). Other this bump, things went really well. The girls had fun painting the poster and all of them worked on a different portion. Sabrina called home to all the parents and we think (and hope!) that everyone is coming on Saturday.
It was a little sad saying goodbye to the girls. Melissa had left a little early, but the East girls were emotional at the end. I was so happy, though, to see how much the girls (even those who might be a little more challenging) really seemed to have loved STARS.
Hope Saturday is a success! 
Tags: Reflect Category Uncategorized |
2009
12.03
Hey Guys, been doing some web surfing, and am finding some great stuff. Becci also just put up some great one’s on her BLOG
Job Stuff
- If you are looking for a low income school/district that you might be able to get federal loan forgiveness (or you need high needs for Noyce/UTL), here’s where you can look them up
- If you want to check out what your starting salary would be at a district, you can find current teacher contracts for all NYS school districts here
All subjects!
- All types of FREE computer simulations! DNA, Greenhouse Effect, circuits, rates and reactions… students get to change different variables and see the effects, GREAT visuals! Seriously, CHECK THIS OUT!
- Crazy big list of resources… everything from artistic images from of the Earth from throughout the globe to lesson plans to science news to
Earth Science
Physics
Biology Resources
Chemistry Resources
Category Uncategorized |
2009
12.01
One of the first week’s of my field placements I blogged about how we allowed students to build, test, rebuild, and retest rockets. For 7th and 8th grade we used this as a way to demonstrate “the scientific method” as well as introduce variables, but this general activity can be used in so many more ways (and for physics classes you can actually use it for concepts such as projectile motion, forces, etc).
Blue Print for air pressure launcher
A pdf that gives details on how to build this launcher can be found here
A pdf with a slightly different launcher design can be found here (includes sample lesson plan)
Rocket on the Launch pad (electric pump)
You can also "go green" and use a hand pump.
It’s too bad I had to blur out their excited faces!
For another spin on rocket launching, you can make a water rocket launcher. NASA’s education website provides a pdf with instructions here
And speaking of which, if you ever have time to poke around, NASA has some really great ideas for education on their website
Tags: Share Resources Category Uncategorized |
2009
12.01
This was our last week of STARS with official Warner lesson plans. Our main objective of the day was to interview the girls to determine their growth in terms of our STARS goals and objectives. Our other main goal was to continue working on our presentations by beginning a powerpoint and starting work on our trifolds. We wanted the girls to already be thinking and working on this project to make our day with our full teams more productive.
On my end of things, the day went really well. I did all the interviews. Sabrina and I thought it would be best for one GRS teacher to conduct the interviews so there was more consistency. I was missing one girl for the interviews, but the rest of the FS pink team did a great job on their assessments! We asked them a lot of questions (around 20) that were carefully designed to make sure we had good evidence for all of our objectives. I was impressed how the girls were able to articulate a lot of really complex answers. There were of course questions that the girls struggled with and some misconceptions were made apparent that I wish I had more time to address. Overall, however, the interviews made clear how much each girl had grown over the course of STARS. I was so proud at the way they were able to articulate aspects of their investigation and was psyched when all the girls indicated that they believed their STARS work was real science, making them real scientists.
I asked the girls whether or not STARS would have been different if we had allowed boys to join. Each girl said that it is better that boys aren’t involved. The girls felt that boys might take over the conversations, be a distraction, or act less maturely. One girl thought that adding boys would be tough because there were already so many girls that it would make the groups too big and it would be more difficult for the teachers to manage.
Though my end of the day went very well, Sabrina encountered some struggles during poster preparation. Some girls were really focused and we got a great start to a Powerpoint and material for a trifold. However, a couple of the girls started talking about personal issues that were really inappropriate for STARS and Sabrina had trouble refocusing the conversation on science. In addition, we had promised to bring the girls a little treat this week to celebrate our last day of STARS at the Freedom school (Sabrina’s homemade, from scratch brownies… yum!). This caused a little conflict because the green team teachers received some backlash from their girls about not getting a treat (and our girls were certainly no help by rubbing it in). Though we did give the other half team our extras, this is something we probably could have planned out so that both teams got a little treat to celebrate the last day (I think Rich Ryan says that extrinsic rewards are okay if the girls aren’t expecting them… is that right Joe?)
Tags: Reflect Category Uncategorized |
2009
11.13
It’s getting to be crunch time for STARS… next week we will be doing our video interviews! We had already finished with our data collection and graphing, so this week we tried to get the girls reflecting on our investigation. We had them brainstorm a way to describe our investigation, how we carried it out, what we found, and how that relates to environmental footprints. To encourage the girls to do this, we showed them the news story of our half team at East who got interviewed.
We also wanted to make this week a little more exciting for the girls, so we did a POE demo with combustion of ethanol (the flame was a bit difficult to see as we did it outside and it was nice and sunny) and an eco-scavenger hunt in the school.
Some pluses and arrows for this week include:
+ We had all of our girls there this week for the first time in over a month!
+ We did get a start on reflecting on our investigation which will help prepare the girls for next week’s interviews and for putting together their powerpoint presentation
+ We kept the girls moving locations and tried to incorporate some exciting activities to avoid the data coma of last week
–> Our girls wandered a lot today. Every time we changed location, we seemed to lose a girl and when we found her, another girl had disappeared. Some of this may have been because we were changing rooms a lot. I think we need to continue to let the girls that we really need them there to help with our investigation.
–> One of our girls is having some issues at home. In STARS she has been very negative for the past couple of weeks. It’s very difficult to get her engaged in activities, she is often rude and distracting to the other girls, and she makes negative comments and complains throughout the lesson. Sabrina and I have struggled with how to handle the situation. We have tried letting her know how it makes us feel, trying to give her jobs/activities to engage her, and letting her know that the team really needs her help. We are hesitant to come down on her two hard because she is clearly dealing with some bigger issues right now and because we don’t want STARS to feel like school. Next week we will continue to encourage her to participate and perhaps talk to her away from the group if her behavior continues to let her know how it makes us feel.
–> It was very difficult to find a space that allowed the girls to focus. The other group was in the library, there was a meeting in the Hirambe room as well as boys in and out, the upstairs classroom had very loud video games being played, and outside also had boys as a distraction (and though sunny, it was too cold to do everything outside!)
Tags: Reflect Category Uncategorized |
