AP Physics: Conservation of Momentum

We had a board meeting on last week’s conservation of momentum lab. As part of their whiteboards, I asked students to write a CER on whether their results made sense and encouraged them to use Newton’s Laws in their thinking. The 1st Law was a much more popular approach than the 3rd Law, but I was pleased at the connections were making.

Physics: Annotating Graphs

Students started working on some problems to annotate velocity vs. time graphs and write equations for the area. I think this is helping some of my students to make more connections to what the graph actually represents, which will be an important stepping stone to solving problems. I also added some problems that just ask students to sketch and annotate a v-t graph from the kind of written description that would start a problem.

Chemistry Essentials: Temperature vs. Heat

We took some notes on heat and temperature, then I asked students to predict whether there would be a larger temperature change when I added a small amount of boiling water or a large amount of warm water to a large beaker of room temperature water. Students seemed to wrap their heads around the difference and were able to explain why the warm water produced a bigger temperature change after the demo.