Etch 'n Sketch Reflections

Another busy week is just about in the books, and both 7th and 8th grade had plenty to keep them busy. The 7th graders started a lab this week that focuses on Newton's laws, and we are making catapults to measure the comparisons between the amount of force that is used and the distance a ping pong ball travels. It has been a little while since the 7th graders have done a lab (and, therefore, a lab report), so we needed to have a refresher on putting together the foundations of the lab report, discussing the creation of a hypothesis, identifying the variables of the investigation, and developing the procedures they were going to follow. Building the catapults was definitely a fun part of the lab, but in order to earn their ping pong ball, groups had to show that they had their procedures and data analysis ready to go. Gotta make them earn it! This week was an odd week for the 8th graders due to afternoon Forward testing. The 8th graders only had one test this week, but I needed to ...

That would be the best description of this week. Both the 7th and 8th-grade classes had their hands full. In 7th grade, to go along with our studies of Newton's laws of motion, the students worked in  8 stations this week, completing short tasks and hands-on activities that they needed to connect to Newton's laws. However, I made a judgment call with the stations, and I decided that it would be more manageable with this particular group of 7th graders if only half of the students did the stations at a time. With a class of 27 students, it would be quite a bit of chaos going on all at once. So, we did 4 stations over 2 days, and while one half of the class was going through stations, the other half was playing a science-themed game site called Legends of Learning. The site is pretty cool because it has games that are linked to the standards, and I can load certain games into a playlist and "assign" them to the students. So, I located the standard we were working with, ...

So, things don't always go as planned. Sometimes that's a bad thing, and sometimes that's a good thing. In the case of some unexpected plans for this week, it was a really good thing! This week, my 8th-grade students were set to work on the next part of the lessons dealing with particle motion when thermal energy is added or removed. To help them understand this process, we had an online simulation set up for the students along with a packet to record their findings. The students did a really nice job with it--it's really nice when you can see that all the students are engaged with what they are doing! However, they were so on task with the simulator that many of the students finished in one day (rather than the two days I had planned for). This left me with a conundrum--there were still a good number of students who needed more time, so I didn't want to just move onto the next task for some of the students because I needed everyone to be at the same point. Plus, t...

4th quarter is here, and I'm looking forward to it! Chemistry experiments on the horizon in 8th grade and a new unit of physical science coming up for the 7th graders! Let's go! This week, the 7th graders have been wrapping up our life science standards with a look at evolution. Upon choosing an organism (I gave them the choice of plant or animal, but all picked animals), they were given the task of learning some basic information about it and identifying key adaptations it had. Then they were given the task of imagining how that animal would evolve 2,000,000 years into the future and come up with new adaptations based on what it would need to survive, as the environment around it had probably gone through changes as well. This being a culmination of a lot of learning on mutations, adaptations, and natural selection, the students had to bring back and apply a lot of what we had talked about. There were definitely a lot of interesting animals that went through some interesting ...