Before I share the chromatography butterflies bulletin board that my chemistry students created, I should make it clear that I’m teaching chemistry this year under some not-so-normal circumstances. I still want to keep my chemistry class as hands-on as possible. This has meant that I have to get creative to find lab activities that my …
Labs
I’m still on a quest to clean out my drafts folder before the new school year starts in a couple of weeks. As most of you know, last year I taught one section of physical science. When I announced to my math classes that we would be celebrating Pi Day, my science kids wanted to …
I am so blessed to be married to a teacher because my husband doesn’t even bat an eye when I ask him to do things like buy me some six foot long pieces of pipe insulation at Lowe’s. Note to self: pick a non-windy day to try and bring this into the building! Shaun also …
Teaching a science class this year has me doing more projects than I’ve probably ever done in all my previous years as a math teacher. Setting up projects in an effective way has been a definite learning curve. This week, my students have been working on designing egg drop devices. I had students break into …
When we got back from Christmas Break, I realized that we still hadn’t done any labs to explore the effect of concentration on reaction rates. Frustrated from how our previous labs had gone, I decided to just do a whole-class demonstration so we could move on to the next skill. We worked together to create …
For our next experiment on chemical reactions in physical science, we made rust. I thought that I had learned from my mistakes with the previous effervescent tablets lab. We spent a class period designing the lab together. We wrote a hypothesis as a class. We discussed how to set up the experiment and collect …
I decided to follow up our glow stick demonstration with an effervescent tablet lab. This, sadly, did not go that well. I assumed that my students would be able to design their own experiments. My groups tried to do this, but most groups didn’t pay attention to what data they would need to collect. My …
This glow sticks reaction rate lab was one of my favorite physical science lessons of the year! To get my students thinking about the impact of temperature on reaction rate, I decided to do a demonstration with glow sticks. It turned into one of the most enjoyable lessons of my teaching career! Here’s what my …
We tested our new found stoichiometry skills by figuring out how many molecules we would consume if we drank from the school water fountain for 30 seconds. I had my students make predictions before we started. Their predictions turned out to be waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyy off. Let’s just say the highest prediction was 1,000,000 molecules of water. …
What do you do when a chunk of your physical science class is away at the state softball tournament, it’s Friday, and you just finished a chapter but don’t want to start the new chapter until Monday? You decide to give your students a piece of sidewalk chalk and a chalk messages measurement lab to …