Physics: Van de Graaff

We started by discussing the results of yesterday’s lab. It ended up much more teacher-centered than I would have liked; I had a few different concepts I wanted students to take away from the lab, and I wasn’t quite sure how to have students summarize their results on a whiteboard or how to guide the discussion to get students to those concepts. It also didn’t help that about half of my students were on a field trip and the empty room made students more self-conscious about speaking up. After discussing the lab, we played with the Van de Graaff generator. Students did a nice job of using what they’d gotten from the lab to make predictions and construct explanations of what we saw with the generator.

Chemistry: Finish Review

No one managed to finish yesterday’s assignment, so we spent some time discussing together the parts students had finished, then I gave them time to finish the rest. I’d hoped to start a lab today, but many students needed the whole hour to work.