Today was the start of a new trimester and, in the excitement, I forgot to take pictures today.

AP Physics: Reviewing Final

I wanted students to go over some problems from last week’s final exam. For one of the problems, I picked a really strong solution, as well as a few that were representative of the most common mistakes, and gave them a scoring guide to assign points. Students said this really helped them get a clear understanding of what exactly is expected, as well as to think about why the wrong answers were wrong. A lot of students realized they’d made mistakes because they did not read carefully, so I need to work on integrating some reading strategies for complex problems.

Physical Science: Marshmallow Challenge

Our 9th grade science sequence is two trimesters of earth science and one trimester of physics. This year, physics is in the middle, so today started our physical science trimester. In spite of this being a full-year course, only 3 of my 35 students had earth science with me last trimester.

Today, we did Tom Wujec’s Marshmallow Challenge, where teams build a tower out of spaghetti, string, and tape with a marshmallow on top. I really like that the TED talk and other resources make it easy to use this to talk about growth mindset, effective collaboration, and other ideas that I want to place as important right away. I also really like having students do something the very first day of class, since it drives home the message that they will need to be active in this class.