Chemical Reactions

Day 122: Central Net Force, Snakey Springs, & Gallery Walk

/ Marta R. Stoeckel / 1 Comment

AP Physics 1: Central Net Force

Tomorrow is an off-campus learning day for seniors and freshmen, so I assigned my students to collect and graph data from a Pivot Interactives to determine what affects the force required to keep an object moving in a circle. To prime them, we spent some time today whiteboarding to get at the idea that an object moving in a circle must be experiencing unbalanced forces. Both sections came to a consensus on the free-body diagram pretty quickly and had exactly the conversations I wanted them to on the way.

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Physics: Snakey Springs

Students played with snakey springs to start building some ideas about waves. We had them tie a ribbon onto the spring to make it easier to track the particle motion of a small piece of the wave.

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Chemistry Essentials: Gallery Walk

We did a gallery walk of Friday’s problems before moving on to the balancing quiz. A lot of students opted to use the Mathlink cubes during the quiz, which I decided I’m okay with.

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Day 121: Quiz & Balancing

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AP Physics 1: Circuits Quiz

Students took their quiz over circuits. Afterward, we spent some time using Plickers to practice multiple choice questions. We had some good discussion about how to identify what’s most important in the text of a problem.

Physics: Oscillating Spring Quiz

Students took their quiz on oscillating springs. I haven’t started grading them yet, but students were feeling pretty good.

Chemistry Essentials: Balancing Reactions

Students worked on some balancing problems that involve polyatomic ions in parentheses. The idea of distributing a subscript is tricky for a lot of students, but they made good progress.

Day 120: Mistakes Whiteboarding & Lab Practical

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AP Physics 1: Circuits Mistakes Whiteboarding

I forgot to take a picture, but students did some mistakes whiteboarding with yesterday’s problems. We moved quickly enough through circuits that I think I’ll need to make sure I have some circuit materials worked into our review, but students are feeling pretty good about this topic.

Physics: Spring Lab Practical

Students finished up a lab practical finding an unknown mass using both Hooke’s Law and the period on a spring. Students who didn’t include units in their work tended to get two different answers; most groups got a spring constant in N/cm and without units in the calculations, they tended to miss the need to convert. It was a good lesson in the value of units. It also occurred to me I should incorporate this lab into my AP review since students are finding both gravitational mass and inertial mass.

spring practical

Chemistry Essentials: Balancing Mistakes

We did mistakes whiteboarding with yesterday’s balancing problems. Right now, students mostly seem to be understanding what to do, but need to build up some confidence. I’m really pleased with how well the Mathlink cubes have been working as a manipulative; they are even helping students quite a bit with going between formulas and particle diagrams.

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Day 119: Problems, Lab Practical, & Balancing

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I had a sub today.

AP Physics 1: Circuit Problems

I introduced students to Trevor Register’s KVL diagrams yesterday. Today, I had them work on some problems using the diagram and Kirchhoff’s Laws.

Physics: Lab Practical

Students started a lab practical where they using a spring to find an unknown mass two different ways. I gave them some structure that should steer them to use Hooke’s Law, then the period of the spring. I’ll be curious to see how it went.

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Chemistry Essentials: Balancing

Students worked on some problems balancing chemical reactions. At my co-teacher’s suggestion, we got some Mathlink cubes for students to use as a manipulative. I’m curious to see how it goes; when I used some on Tuesday, they seemed to help make balancing more concrete for students.
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Day 118: Board Meeting, Mistakes Whiteboarding, & Conservation of Mass

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AP Physics 1: Kirchhoff Board Meeting

We had a board meeting where students shared the rules they’d come up with for current and potential difference, which lead into Kirchhoff’s rules. My students missed some details, especially around current, that I wanted them to see; normally, I would have sent them back to the lab to experiment a little more, but I ended up pointing out the info in the interest of time.

Physics: Mistakes Whiteboarding

We did some mistakes whiteboarding with yesterday’s problems. There are some students who haven’t had me before, so this was their first exposure to mistakes whiteboarding. A few of them started laughing and making some comments when a group clearly had some clearly unintentional mistakes, so I stepped in more than usual and, with help from students who’ve done this before, managed to shift the tone pretty quickly. I’ve been more conscious this year overall that I need to reset the culture in my classroom each trimester, but I dropped the ball today and didn’t revisit what it looks like to contribute during this kind of whiteboard discussion.

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Chemistry Essentials: Conservation of Mass Lab

Students did a reaction in a Ziploc bag to see the conservation of mass in action. Students got good results, but balancing the reaction was tricky. The reaction is one of the trickier ones I ask students to balance in this course, so this may have been better near the end of the unit.

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Day 117: Kirchhoff’s Laws, Problems, & Balancing

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AP Physics 1: Kirchhoff’s Laws

Students used PhET’s circuit construction kit to look for patterns in series and parallel circuits. Students were pretty successful at noticing the things I wanted them to notice and I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s discussion of the results.

circuit kit parallel

Physics: Problems

Students worked on some problems using the spring period equation. We also spent some time on whole-class discussion about the motion graphs for an object on a spring, and tested a lot of ideas using a motion encoder cart hooked to a force sensor with a spring.

Maker:S,Date:2017-10-21,Ver:6,Lens:Kan03,Act:Lar02,E-Y

Chemistry Essentials: Balancing Reactions

Students used PhET’s balancing chemical equations simulation to start figuring out what it means for a reaction to be balanced. Students were pretty successful at working out the significance of each of the tools the PhET activity provided, along with what it means to be balanced. Even though I didn’t assign the game, a few students decided to play and ended the hour with a lot of confidence and enthusiasm for balancing problems.

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Day 116: Whiteboarding

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AP Physics 1: Coulomb’s Law Whiteboarding

We spent some time doing some practice multiple choice problems, then used whiteboards for a gallery walk of yesterday’s problems on Coulomb’s Law and Ohm’s Law.

Physics: Spring Representations Whiteboarding

Students whiteboarded various representations for an object vibrating on a spring, then we did some discussing to come to an agreement on what those representations should look like.

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Chemistry Essentials: Mistake Whiteboarding

We finished going through the whiteboards students prepped earlier this week for a round of mistakes whiteboarding. I’m getting excited to start balancing chemical equations with these students next week; several students have started pointing out when the number of a given element changes between the products and reactants as a sign that something is wrong.

Day 115: Board Meeting & Connecting Representations to Observations

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AP Physics 1: Ohm’s Law Board Meeting

We had a board meeting for yesterday’s results. One of the things I was really happy about is not all groups used the same approach to dealing with three variables. Some did one experiment graphing current and voltage, followed by a second experiment graphing current and resistance. Others just graphed current and voltage, but did the same experiment with two different resistances.

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Physics: Spring Period Board Meeting

We whiteboarded the results from this week’s lab on spring period. When writing the equation, a lot of students had trouble with when to use a unit and when to use a variable, but that’s been tough throughout this year. I think a lot of students are struggling to distinguish what those two things communicate, so I need to give some thought to how to teach that difference.

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Chemistry Essentials: Connecting Representations and Observations

One of the things I think has been missing in the second half of this course is students draw very few connections between what they actually see in the lab and the representations they use for chemical reactions, so my co-teacher and I decided to work on that this year. Today, we did a lab where students did several simple chemical reactions, then identified observations that support specific elements of the reaction equation. For example, when students reacted copper (II) chloride with aluminum, they were able to recognize the reddish powder that replaced the aluminum was the copper predicted by the reaction equation.

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Day 114: Ohm’s Law, Spring Period, & Mistakes Whiteboarding

/ Marta R. Stoeckel / 1 Comment

AP Physics 1: Ohm’s Law

Students used PhET’s circuit construction kit to find a relationship between current, voltage, and resistance. It was the first time students were asked to work with three variables at once on a pretty open-ended lab, but they were very successful at coming up with ways to approach the task.

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Physics: Spring Period

Students finished their data collection and graphing for the period of a spring lab. A lot of groups went straight to a quadratic relationship to linearize their graph, which makes me think they were treating it as an automatic process, rather than thinking through what their graph suggests. It didn’t take much coaching to get students to switch to a square root linearization, but I’ll need to keep working on what it actually means to linearize a graph.

Chemistry Essentials: Mistakes Whiteboarding

We did some mistakes whiteboarding using yesterday’s problems on representing reactions. Students were very successful at figuring out the mistakes and they are gradually getting the hang of the various details they need to carefully represent.

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Day 113: Board Meeting, Spring Period, & Representing Reactions

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AP Physics 1: Coulomb’s Law Board Meeting

We had a board meeting to discuss the results of yesterday’s lab. Students were quick to buy into the inverse square relationship and to recognize how their results support that like charges repel and opposites attract. I haven’t found a great way to get at the meaning of the slope, but its at least pretty intuitive that the amount of charge should affect the size of the force.

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Physics: Spring Period

Students collected data to figure out what affects the period of a mass oscillating on a spring. Today was one of the days when the progress my students have made in designing an experiment was very apparent, which made it a lot of fun to listen to them plan and troubleshoot their approaches.

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Chemistry Essentials: Representing Reactions

Students practiced translating between reaction equations, statements, and particle diagrams. One of the big challenges is my students were in very different places, especially when it came to particle diagrams and switching between names and formulas. About a third of my students took Chem Ess A with me last tri, so they were just extending some fairly recent learning. Another third took Chem Ess A with me tri 1, so have seen these skills, but haven’t used them in a few months. The rest of the students came to me from other teachers who don’t use particle diagrams and several haven’t had chemistry since last year, which gave them a much higher mental load. Most tables had a mix of students from each group, which meant there was a lot of peer teaching today, which helped with the variation quite a bit.