Thoughts on the Matter

Building background knowledge is hugely important in making connections.  Students come from a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences and need some common experiences to draw from.  While force and motion are very easy to relate to real world situations, I feel that it also important to throw a little relevance and fun into the learning equation. Enter marbles ..... Discovery Education had a really great article that discussed how marbles and force were connected.  The diagrams were great, and encouraged students to play and get that hands on experience.  We created a marble circle in our room and I printed out instructions , so students would have some rules to go by.  The marble circle was on the small side and the students encountered some glitches with the prescribed rules and tweaked them to meet their needs.  All in all, marbles were a success.  Students were able to effectively communicate what they were learning as they were playing t...

I was pretty excited today.  I've been thinking up ways to include my Dash and Dot robots into the curriculum, and today it became a reality. We're learning about force and motion. The particular standard we are working on is SC. 5.P.13.2  Investigate and describe that the greater the force applied to it, the greater the change in motion of a given object. We used Blockly to create a very simple code to send Dash 100 cm.  We attached the bulldozer bar to Dash and placed a small plastic golf ball in front of him.  At first we set him to normal speed, and recorded how far the ball rolled after he stopped.  We repeated this a few times to make sure our data was reliable.   Once we had some information, students hypothesized what would happen to the ball if we changed Dash's speed.  We slowed him down to "very slow".  After students saw the results we changed Dash's speed to "very fast". Students were able to draw some conclusions a...

I attended a workshop on Personalized Learning at FETC, and although I am not prepared to make that jump I think that  blended learning is more my speed.  I am working hard to incorporate the 4 C's in to my classroom (critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity).  As part of this I have really embraced the idea of teaching with centers rather than whole group instruction.  This changes my role from the "sage on the stage" to the "guide on the side".  I'm okay with this.  Students need to be responsible for their own learning. I am not fully prepared to give up on whole group entirely.  I think students need that whole group experience to hear a common message.  To set the stage for the learning I like to use interactive presentations such as Pear Deck.  This allows for me to have some formative assessment, and make decisions. This is the run down of day one of my science stations for Force and Motion.  It was a li...

After two successful Donor's Choose Projects I decided to try again.  This time I was seeking some cool new STEM items.  See the full project  here.     Students working with the Little Bits kit.  Putting the pieces in different order, and seeing the result.  It's great to see students problem solve and be creative. Students working with the Makey-Makey.  After they put it together they tried it out playing a simple video game.  Understanding closed circuits and conductive materials in an entirely cool way.

In my early years of teaching I always had special chairs.  I'd bring in yoga balls, give up my teacher chair, and nab any different seat I could.  Students would be rewarded with a special chair for reaching specific criteria.  Well as the years went on, I stopped.  I can't pin point the reason, but these special chairs faded out of existence.  This year I've brought them back in full force.  They aren't a reward like they were in the past, more of a rotating seating option.  I teach three classes, so we had to come up with a way for it to be fair for everyone.  Students are assigned a computer number and so I created a clip chart with the different options and the clips move down a spot each day.  One of the options is a wobble stool.  Students both love and hate this stool, as do I.  I know in my heart of hearts that its a great way for students to release some energy and get the wiggles out.  However, when there ar...

We've been studying energy.  One of our standards is  that the flow of electricity requires a closed circuit.  Students learned about the difference between conductors and insulators.  Then they started to put it into action. Over the years the materials that I use to teach these standards has sort of evolved.  Initially I had about 3 wires a few tiny light bulbs and some batteries.  The materials would sort of be passed around the room and we'd move on.  I think we even threw in a few switches with metal brads and paper clips on an index card.  Not super memorable. Being fortunate that I get to focus mainly on teaching science my collection of materials for this unit has multiplied.  I had an epiphany at some point (whether it was my own or stolen from another educator I don't even remember) that I could use Christmas lights and my materials for this unit quadrupled.  Now cutting apart strings of Christmas lights in NO...