Saturday, December 27, 2014
Jan. 5 Year End Review + Predictions for the New Year [Is it time for you and your students to take an inventory of their life in 2014 and maybe make predictions for 2015? What interesting self or group conversations can we have in the classroom with this? Can we apply this conversations across our curriculum? What about making a group collage using words or pictures that illustrates who we are or let's us discover who we want to be?]
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My first entry of the New Year is going to be about a lesson that I did last year that I am really proud of and that went really great.
ReplyDeleteFour Forces of Nature:
Day 1, Monday: Students are assigned to draw a super hero that has four super forces (powers). I show them my model. They are to rank the forces from most powerful to least powerful, and describe the forces (powers). Then I showed Teded video of Superhero powers.
Day 2, Tuesday: Video on the four forces of nature and take notes. Redraw superhero and now give the superhero the four forces of nature. Define the four forces and rank them from greatest to weakest. Two short readings that students need it interactively read (highlight important points, add drawings, circle terms that they do not know, and add questions that they may need more information on).
Day 3, Wednesday: Short ppt on the four forces of nature with illustrations and definitions. Refer to textbook where it discusses forces in nature (ch 4). Begin final project (Letter to Sir Issac Newton to thank him for explaining the theory of gravity and telling him about the strong force, weak force, and electromagnetic force as well as telling him how we are continuing to try to combine the forces into the theory of everything.)
Day 4, Thursday: Finish letter in Google apps and share it with teacher. It should be at least 5 paragraphs with 4 pictures and each paragraph should be 3-5 sentences depending on level of students. (I give them a starting paragraph, sentence starters, and an outline for the final paragraph.) The last ten minutes of class was spent on a four question clicker quiz that asked students to match the force with an illustration of that force.
This lesson had students do an activity on something they already knew about (superhero powers) and was creative as well. Then we had new information attached to their superhero. We used multiple media sources (textbook, articles, and video). The students were able to show their understanding of the material in two different ways a letter that they used research for and was open ended and a more direct quiz. Total points for assignment was 100 pts.
It was a great week and was received well by the 8th graders.
This month I am going to try to work on my students taking notes from media by showing a short video at the beginning of each period. 30 videos in 30 days. The videos are on a variety of interesting science questions, like why do we yawn?
ReplyDeleteIn the 8th grade we are continuing to discuss Newton's laws by creating balloon cars and finding the force acting on the car by applying F=ma.
In the 7th grade we are going to learn a little Latin as we continue discussing classification and Kingdoms.