AP Physics: Review

A lot of my students will be taking the AP Chem exam on Monday, so it was the last time the whole class was together before Tuesday’s AP Physics 1 exam. One class asked if we could spend the whole hour on multiple choice, so we worked through a bunch of problems I’d loaded into Plickers. My other section asked for more time to work on the 2017 free response problems, so they got into small groups for that after 20 minutes of multiple choice practice.

Physics: Whiteboarding

Students whiteboarded some of the problems we’ve been working on prior to taking a quiz. A few students have started talking in terms of patterns for the number of notes and anti-nodes which is great. Students are also seeing the diagrams as a tool in ways they have not with previous types of diagrams.

Chemistry Essentials: Lego Reaction Types

Students used Legos to represent ions in chemical reactions to get a better understanding of the different reaction types. Manipulating the blocks seemed to help students get a sense of how the ions are rearranging in a chemical reaction and tie some meaning to the terms from yesterday. I’m wondering if this lab could be reworked to start the unit and motivate the language, rather than simply being an opportunity to practice the terms.