Teacher Kristin W

Third Innovative Lesson

I did my third lesson, the nature of science lesson, on building models of molecules.  This lesson came right after the lesson I taught on the shapes.  I started the lesson by giving out baggies with little slips of paper with element symbols written on it, also included in the baggies were tiddly winks used to represent electrons.  Each bag had enough electrons to make the lewis dot structures to do: NaCl, MgF2, H2O and CO2.  I was hoping this would get the students to begin to think about geometry and how the electron configurations (lone pairs) effects the geometry.  I found one student’s diagram particulary interesting because he included the charge on the magnesium in MgF2 (I will include the picture later as right now it’s not working properly) and even though it’s not entirely correct because the compound would have a neutral charge i thought it was an insightful model.

After I collected back all of the tiddly winks, I gave them a very quick crash course on how to use the model kits and them let them go.  The first few molecules they had actually seen before and I think they did not build them with the model kits, but when the examples got more and more complicated it became essential that they build them.  For each molecule, the students had to build, they also had to name the geometry and say whether it was polar or nonpolar.  Fortunately for me, I had a substitute veteran biology teacher of 34 years from the West Irondequoit district to help me out that day.  During the first block of the day, which there was no class to teach I was able to give him a chemistry book and he read up on how to tell the geometries and the polarities of certain molecules, and he was an awesome help. (And it was like being observed 2x)

Anyways, the day before I had introduced the shapes to them for the first time, and I think they were a bit uneasy with just building the molecules because it was so new.  I got a lot of “How am I supposed to know how to build this?” We always start with the lewis structure and things became obvious from there.  They are always so surprised at how easy the problems they do really are, they just need to be affirmed that they’re starting out the correct way or a little hint in the right direction.  I think everyone seemed to become a lot more comfortable with the shapes and polarities after seeing the models, and after seeing the results of the unit test his was confirmed.  I think at least 3/4 of the students in each class got a perfect score on the geometry/ polarity portion of their unit test.  Going through this lab by trial and error, and seeing the shapes really does help in understanding.

STARS week 9

We had many more girls this week than last week, we gained 4 more.  Thank God we had the same girls from last week because they were able to bring the girls up to speed from last week.  We started out with a fun ice breaker called ‘would you rather’ and we even had the girls say why which turned out to be a fun way to get them to start to think about why scientists need to prove their claims.  (”sometimes scientists have say ‘why’ too+) I, personally would rather be completely hairy so that I would be warm, but some other reasons were that you could style your hair or shave it every week.

We then revisited the information from last week, with the two girls explaining the graphs to the other girls.  Then to see if they underood the information, we asked them what different variables we studied would make the best rocket car.  One girl said the correct things, and when I asked her why she said, “Because those are the biggest bars on the graphs” (Yes +)  We then went back to our model and revised it, but I’m not sure that all of our girls were as engaged as other weeks when there’s more hands on stuff to do. (->)  We had a conversation about what would be important things to include in our tri fold poster for the interactive part of the presentation.  We then showed them pictures from the internet of posters that other kids have made and they were really excited about it, which I was a little surprised but hey al power to them. (+)  We did use April’s suggestion about having two parts to the poster, “cool stuff” and “science story”, and then having the kids generate lists of what they thought was important to put on the poster and then sort them into the two categories.  I was impressed with what they came up with and which category it went into.  All in all i think we got a lot accomplished we just have to put it all together next week for the big day!

I can’t complain but sometimes I still do, life’s been good to me so far

STARS week 8

Week 8 was a nice change up in the game for us because only 2 girls showed up, most likely due to sports, but I think it worked out nicely. It’s hard sometimes to deal with a big change in turnout, we also had a week where only two girls showed up and it can logistically change what you have planned.  We started off with a cool ice breaker where I wrote out some things on an index card and put it on a person’s back and they can’t look at it.  They then have to ask yes and no questions to try and figure out what is on the card.  Some of the words I came up with were skittles, bic mac, dora the explorer, new york city, strawberry ice cream, TI, etc… It actually worked out better that we only had two girs because it took us a little longer to get through the ice breaker than i thought it would.  However, this week we tackled the ever exciting topic of data analysis.  We decided to go back to the stone age and make our graphs BY HAND!  I think this was a good idea because sometimes programs like excel can do weird things to your graphs, and making them by hand allows you to have complete control.  It also means you completely understand the data to present it in a meaningful way.  For example our data is best represented in a bar graph, which we scaffolded the girls into making.

After making the graph and interpreting it’s meaning, we asked the girls what combination of things would make a rocket car go the farthest.  One of our girls said lemon juice, 2 tubes of baking soda and filling the bottle up half way.  I asked her how she knew this and she pointed to the heights of the bar graphs.   This was a teachable moment to point out that scientists make claims but that they have to prove them.  Our proof for our experiments is our data.   We then talked about the actual chemical reaction that is taking place.  For our means we are saying that  acid+base makes a reaction that produces CO2 gas.  We gave the girls some little pictures to paste into their notebooks with the pictures of vinegar, lemon juice and baking soda then we asked them to put the scientific names to the pictures.  We hoped (and got) that the girls would put the two names that had acid next to the vinegar and the lemon juice, which would leave sodium bicarbonate for the baking soda.  Then we said citric acid, kinda sounds like citrus right?  Which do you think was citrus- lemon juice or vinegar? And thats how we introduced some scientific language to the girls.  Anne provided the situation “Imagine you’re baking cookies with your mom and she asks you to pass the baking soda. Instead of yes, dear Mom here it is you could say, ‘wait by baking soda do you mean sodium bicarbonate?’ I thnk it was a good way, even though it was corny, to bring the science we do at STARS home to the family.  I don’t know if any of the girls did tell their parents the actual names of the substances, but hopefully they felt cool to know those words.

So funny!

This puts a smile on my face

Malcolm Gladwell’s new book about Being Lucky

So I must admit I saw this author on Steven Colbert’s show, but I still thought it would be a really cool book to read and think about why certain groups of people in our world are successful and why some are not.  It has real potential to be useful when encountering diverse groups of students in our classrooms.  Here’s something I got from amazon.com–

From Publishers Weekly
SignatureReviewed by Leslie ChangIn Outliers, Gladwell (The Tipping Point) once again proves masterful in a genre he essentially pioneered—the book that illuminates secret patterns behind everyday phenomena. His gift for spotting an intriguing mystery, luring the reader in, then gradually revealing his lessons in lucid prose, is on vivid display. Outliers begins with a provocative look at why certain five-year-old boys enjoy an advantage in ice hockey, and how these advantages accumulate over time. We learn what Bill Gates, the Beatles and Mozart had in common: along with talent and ambition, each enjoyed an unusual opportunity to intensively cultivate a skill that allowed them to rise above their peers. A detailed investigation of the unique culture and skills of Eastern European Jewish immigrants persuasively explains their rise in 20th-century New York, first in the garment trade and then in the legal profession. Through case studies ranging from Canadian junior hockey champions to the robber barons of the Gilded Age, from Asian math whizzes to software entrepreneurs to the rise of his own family in Jamaica, Gladwell tears down the myth of individual merit to explore how culture, circumstance, timing, birth and luck account for success—and how historical legacies can hold others back despite ample individual gifts. Even as we know how many of these stories end, Gladwell restores the suspense and serendipity to these narratives that make them fresh and surprising.One hazard of this genre is glibness. In seeking to understand why Asian children score higher on math tests, Gladwell explores the persistence and painstaking labor required to cultivate rice as it has been done in East Asia for thousands of years; though fascinating in its details, the study does not prove that a rice-growing heritage explains math prowess, as Gladwell asserts. Another pitfall is the urge to state the obvious: No one, Gladwell concludes in a chapter comparing a high-IQ failure named Chris Langan with the brilliantly successful J. Robert Oppenheimer, not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires and not even geniuses—ever makes it alone. But who in this day and age believes that a high intelligence quotient in itself promises success? In structuring his book against that assumption, Gladwell has set up a decidedly flimsy straw man. In the end it is the seemingly airtight nature of Gladwell’s arguments that works against him. His conclusions are built almost exclusively on the findings of others—sociologists, psychologists, economists, historians—yet he rarely delves into the methodology behind those studies. And he is free to cherry-pick those cases that best illustrate his points; one is always left wondering about the data he evaluated and rejected because it did not support his argument, or perhaps contradicted it altogether. Real life is seldom as neat as it appears in a Malcolm Gladwell book. (Nov.)Leslie T. Chang is the author of Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China (Spiegel & Grau).
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Here’s a link to a video about Malcolm talking about his book.  http://www.amazon.com/gp/mpd/permalink/m3K73VOL0U85ZQ

Another Fast Weekend Goes By

Friday I taught a lesson on molecular geometry and the basic shapes- tetrahedral, linear, bent, trigonal planar and pyramidal.  I knew this would be a difficult lesson to teach because I remember when I learned it in college that I was very confused about it all.  I also knew this particular class would be challenging to teach this too, since this class has a chatty tendency. As a warm up they drew bubbles around elements in molecules, where the bubbles would be bigger around the more electronegative element in the molecule.  This was to show, in a simplified way, the dipole moments involved.  I used a ppt presentation to help the students fill out a graphic organizer about the shapes, their shared/ unshared electrons, elements and groups involved and some examples.  They were very confused at first and I could tell that they were getting frustrated, I dealt with this by telling them that most times in chemistry you’ll encounter something and not quite understand it, but later it will make a lot more sense.  They were a little unwilling to believe this, but it helped in moving on.  After filling out the organizer, I did some examples on the board about how to draw the shapes and how to tell if they are polar, by canceling the dipoles.  The classic examples of this are CO2 and H2O.  I then passed out a paper with some examples of molecular shapes and circulated to see how it was coming.  They tend to do this work in pairs, which I think was very good because they used each other as resources.  I passed out some index cards and asked the students to answer three questions.  First, what are three shapes that could result in either non polar or polar molecules? Second, what are two examples of linear geometry? And what is one thing you’re still confused about.  Probably on fourth of the class were uncertain about the canceling of the dipoles, one fourth was confused about how to know when to use which geometry and the remaining half said they didn’t feel confused.  One girl said “I was really confused at first but I feel much better about it now.” 

Friday night I saw the Quantum of Solace, the  new James Bond movie, which I thought was very good, but I wish they would do more with the Bond car.  Yes, I know we got a short look into the car in the last movie, but I want to see more about what it looks like, which is hard because in every movie he pretty much destroys the car.  Saturday night I went to UB and saw Jon Stewart, he was really funny.  He said that our military’s technology is growing, we have the greatest military in the world, but somethign like the 26th  best education.  Instead of dropping smart bombs on our enemies we should be dropping illiterate fourth graders.  “Ok there goes Jimmy onto the roof of the terrorist building with his spray paint can, spelling out eat me…. E-E-T M-E…..Jimmy!!”  He talked about college and the campaigns, and offered some great advice, but you can read more about what he said here.

Not so safety first

Huge flames, but at least he’s wearing goggles right?

The flames seem awful close to the bottle of combustable chemicals right behind them…

Second innovative lesson

My community of science lesson is tomorrow and I’m still planning on Sunday night :/ I’m doing a lesson on polarity and coordinate covalent bonding, which I thought was weird because it was somehting I didn’t learn until inorganic and bioinorganic chemistry, but I think its cool because I’m going back to my college notes to teach this class. They’re going to do a warm up involving dice and naming compounds and molecules.  I’m going to start the lesson off with a demo of water and oil, and ask them if they know whats going on.  Hopefully i’ll get some misconceptions, but we can revisit that later.  Then I’m going to go through some notes so they can follow along in their capture sheets.  Nonpolar covalent bonding is easier to understand at first, so I”m going to start with that and talk about electronegativity difference and hopefully draw out some examples of nonpolar substances like  carbon chains and fats.

Then onto polar covalent bonding.  This has applications to water, DNA, most strong acids and many other biomolecules. I found this great idea for part of a lesson online and it had a great picture of a polar bear and a penguin both holding an ice cream cone (pg 11 of pdf).  I’m going to put the picture up on the screen and ask them to do a think/ pair/ share about what each part of the picture might represent.  After that I will show them how ions are dissolved in water (Solvation shells) and this is where the community part comes in.  I’m going to ask them to take a picture with their parent where their parent could be a Na+ ion and the student has to properly orient the water molecule (mickey mouse ears) to the parent and take a picture of it.  I’m going to give out a homework pass to the best and most creative picture, and obviously I’m going to say that if they don’t have a digital camera they can come to me and we can work something out.  Then we’re going to talk about coordinate covalent bonding and revisit the oil and water demo where I’ll then add some detergent so it emulsifies.  I’ll then play review bingo, if there’s any time leftover they can start their homework or make some mickey mouse ears for the picture.

STARS week 7

This was a good week for STARS, again we got so much done and I even did a little mini lesson with the girls.  We had a discussion about variable and controls, so Chris made this awesome graphic organize with two circles.  Each girl got a different slip of paper with amount of baking soda, amount of liquid, type of liquid, car design, gravity, road surface, etc… We had the girls place in either of the two circle where they thought the variables might go and then we talked about each one in the context of an experiment we had previously done, which was vinegar versus lemon juice.  In this case we had decided to move all of the papers over to controls except for one variable which was ‘type of liquid’.  I asked the question, do you think it’s a coincidence that there’s only one variable?  The girls said no, that it wouldn’t be a fair test to change more than one variable.  (+)  We then asked the girls which variables they wanted to do for the experiment and they said amount of liquid and amount of baking soda.

We then went out to the hallway where Anne had set up our track for the cars to run on.  We had the girls paste some empty tables in their notebooks and get them set up so they could easily enter the data.  However we try to set up the tables so that they can be EASILY set up the “right” way, some girls somehow manage to do it their own way. (->) Not sure if this is really an arrow if they know how to read their own table but whatev.  The first trials were experiementing with amount of liquid so we had the girls set up bottles with 3/4 lemon juice and 1/2 full of lemon juice.  We soon realized that goggles would be necessary and turned out to be quite the teachable moment when Chris, Anne and I all got sprayed by some liquid.  Tuesday is the new laundry day for me, since each week somehow I manage to do something dumb, this week I got lemon juice and vinegar in my hair, soaked my left sock and pant leg and on my shirt, but hey it’s all in the name of science. (+)

The good and bad thing about this experiment is that so much pressure is behind your finger when you plug up the hole, we found it best to have either of the 3 adults do it for some of the trials because it does end up hurting your thumb.  We did have a couple of girls doing this, but if we had three hallways, 7 cars, 7 gallons of lemon juice and vinegar and 3 hours we’d be able to have all of the girls participating. (->) But all of the girls were engaged and got all of the information in their tables, so I think it went very well. (+)  This week coming is a BYE week due to Veterans day, and when we come back it’ll be time to look at the data to see some trends.

Innovative Inquiry Lesson

Last Friday I taught one of my three innovative lessons and it was the inquiry one.  I was pretty nervous for the first class, but they are the ones I know the best so I think it was good to start out with them because I am the most familiar with them.  This is a class that is dominated by boys, which I thought might be a problem for me.  In fact, they were on their best behavior and one of the most disruptive kids was turning around to tell others to pay attention.  I’m pretty sure that was for brownie points, but I didn’t really care because it was helpful.  I’m not sure if teaching for the first time on Halloween was a great decision, but considering it was also on a Friday, I think the classes I taught were well behaved.

I started off the class by asking them what they thought an electrolyte was, and I got some common misconceptions, like its a sugar, where electrolytes are found (in gatorade), and some random comments (well it’s an electro and it lights up).  So I told them that these were interesting ideas and explained a little bit of directions for the lab.  I then put the stack of labs next to me and told them all to come up to the front of the room.  This created a little traffic problem as they all surrounded me to get a paper, and I think from then on I should take a couple steps back because I felt like monkey in the middle.  The lab consisted of the students putting 2 electrodes into a sample and recording on a table whether or not it lit up the bulb.  The problem with this lab, though, was that on the table it asks you to state whether the sample was ionic, covalent, acidic or basic.  At this point, they didn’t know what covalent was or what the different samples were, so we went over that as a class together.  This actually turned out to be a good technique because as we were identifying the category, they (as a class) started to see a trend that only the covalent samples weren’t lighting up the bulb.

We went through some notes which talked more about electrolytes and moved on to Lewis dot diagrams.  Thankfully my CT now has a Smartboard, which was really cool because I called on some kids to come up to the board and show the flow of the electrons.  One thing I tried to do was ask questions.  For example, I asked why do atoms for ions? They said, to lose or gain the electrons, but I kept probing because I wanted to get toward stability.  Why would they want to lose or gain electrrons? They said, to get a full octet.  Well, why does that matter? I dont think they were expecting me to ask them why something mattered in chemistry, but I was confident that they could think of it, so I gave them some extra wait time for this.  I did finally get someone who said that the atoms want to be ‘happy’.  One thing I should have done more was write more stuff down, at the end of the lesson someone had a blank spot on their notes even though I did talk about that material.  Its weird how not writing something on the board makes it not important or even like it never happened.  They had 15 minutes at the end to work on the lab and homework questions.

The second time I taught this for fourth block, it went much more smoothly.  However, it was also Friday afternoon and Halloween so there was a lot more chatter.  I dealt with this by walking around more, and I would periodically stand nearby kids who were being chatty and it shut them  up.  By the end of the day I was really tired, it’s hard being the center of attention.  I feel like so much has happened since last Friday, we had Halloween weekend, the Bill v. Jets game, I worked 22 hours at Kohls, and today we elected a new president.