AP Physics: Presentations

Students continued presenting their work. In one class, the number of presentations I scheduled per day is spot in. In the other, presentations are flying by and won’t need the full period tomorrow. I need to give some thought to what that class will do after finishing presentations.

Earth Science: Mystery Block

To revisit relative ages, students had to determine the steps in making a mystery block. There were a couple of particular elements that provoked some great conversation. In particular, one side had white paint and some grooves. The color made it very tough to tell if there was any paint in the grooves, so students had to use other features on that side to decide whether the paint or the grooves came first. Next time, I’d like to use this at the start of the unit as a model-building lab; I’m pretty sure this is a concrete enough context that students can reason out most of the principles for relative dating.

AP Physics: Presentations

Students started presenting their projects today. A full class period of student presentations can be deadly, but I wanted students to have an opportunity to share their work with their peers and couldn’t come up with a good alternative. Students ended up very engaged; over the last few weeks, they’ve heard bits and pieces about each other’s projects and seemed to enjoy seeing how everything came together. In one class in particular, students had some great questions after each presentation that showed they were really thinking about what they heard.

Earth Science: Cenozoic Minnesota

We started class by whiteboarding what students came up with for Minnesota’s Paleozoic era. There was some really nice discussion linking to earlier topics about why there are very few Precambrian fossils in Minnesota. Afterward, we continued the pattern with Minnesota’s Cenozoic rocks and landforms.

AP Physics: Skip Day

The Friday before Memorial Day is traditionally senior skip day at Tartan, so my classes were very small. The students who were here worked on their projects. One student was surprised that the fits on his raw data and linearized data had the same coefficient and intercept, which is a good reminder that I need to keep having students verbalize what their slope means, not just what physical quantity it represents, especially when dealing with linearized graphs. Since all but two of my students were either in calculus this year or took it last year, they were able to say a lot of the right words, but I still need to make sure they have a clear understanding of what is behind the words.

Earth Science: Ancient Minnesota

I gave students some information about precambrian rocks in Minnesota, then had them use what they’ve learned this trimester to make some inferences about that era. I had students point to a specific piece of evidence to support each statement they made, but I think this activity would have been better served by having them do a CER for each inference, instead.

AP Physics: Trampoline

Students continued to work on their projects. One student wanted to study trampoline physics, but was having some trouble figuring out how to get reliable jumps. She ended up building a mini “trampoline” by stretching some lycra over a bucket to get something easier to control and collect data from.

Technology access is more of an issue than I anticipated. I have some students who would like to use video analysis on their project, but had fallen behind and were not ready to take advantage of the time last week we were able to spend in the computer lab. Next year, I want to spend more time having students do some backwards planning on their project. I had them submit a proposal to me, and I might have them include a timeline.

Earth Science: Superposition

Students got some cross sections and had to rank the age of various features. Students were very successful at figuring out not just the rules of thumb for determining relative age, but making sense of why those rules are true.