AP Physics 1: Assessment

Students to a quiz on free-body diagrams and momentum, which ended up taking a much bigger chunk of the hour than I’d hoped. In one of my classes, students are starting to ask for reading strategies for deciphering problems, which is great. I tend to get a lot of students who are very strong readers, so I usually wait until there is a problem on an assessment that a lot of students clearly got wrong because of reading to ensure students see a need for reading strategies, but since my students are self-aware enough to realize they could use some new strategies before its an issue, I’m happy to start in on those strategies early.

Physics: Card Sort

Students did a balanced forces card sort from Kelly O’Shea, with a lot of influence from Richard Wright, though I left out the system schema that Michael Lerner added. Before the card sort, I spent some time talking about system schema and free-body diagrams, but left my students to figure out the vector addition diagrams in the card sort. In my 1st hour, this went really well; there were great conversations, and my students seem to really get vector addition diagrams. In my 6th hour, things were much rougher; they tend to be less focused (its like they’ve had five classes before mine or something) and I could tell they hadn’t gotten as much out of yesterday’s interaction stations, which made it very tough to build on today. In general, I think I need to do a better job of adjusting to my 6th hour.

Chemistry Essentials: Phase Changes 

Students collected temperature and time data for lauric acid as it went from solid to liquid and back again. The data collection requires constant stirring and recording the temperature every 20 seconds, but the graph comes out really nice.