Instructional Strategies

Day 161: Project Work & Whiteboarding

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There was some extra chaos today and I dropped the ball on getting photos.

AP Physics: Project Work

Students worked on wrapping up their final projects. A lot of them are getting excited about presenting tomorrow. There are several students who had very ambitious proposals that I encouraged to scale back their project who have ended sticking with their original plan because they are enjoying the project, which is awesome. One student worked out the force on his legs at several key points during a hurdle race, along with trying to find the optimal launch speed for jumping over a hurdle.

Physics: Review Whiteboarding

Students did some more whiteboarding to review for tomorrow’s final. When sketching diagrams for a spring, a lot of groups had trouble with which direction the spring force was acting.

Chemistry Essentials: Whiteboarding

Students whiteboarded yesterday’s problems. The two hours before this class, there had been some excitement related to senior pranks, so the students were much more keyed up than usual and it was tough for them to stay focused. I also found students were having trouble keeping track of  a lot of the details on the bar charts, which isn’t surprising given how quickly we’ve been moving through this content.

Day 160: Graphite Wire, Pendulum Review, & Energy Bar Charts

/ Marta R. Stoeckel / 1 Comment

Today was the start of seniors’ last week of school.

AP Physics: Graphite Wire

Students continued to work on their final projects. One student used a graphite pencil to sketch “wires” on a sheet of paper and worked on collecting data on the potential difference at the LED. I wasn’t sure if a pencil would leave a thick enough layer of graphite, so got pretty excited when she got this to work.

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Its hard to see, but the LED is glowing!

Physics: Pendulum Review

With the final exam starting on Thursday, we took some time today to start reviewing. I started with some pendulum questions that I expected to be pretty quick and easy, but it took a lot longer than I hoped. I didn’t do as nice a job of spiraling as I would have liked this spring, so students were very rusty on some of the concepts they needed.

 

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Chemistry Essentials: Energy Bar Charts

Students worked on energy bar charts for chemical reactions. The hardest part for a lot of students was parsing what exactly was happening at each snapshot for the energy bar carts; in general, I haven’t pushed the idea that some representations are like a photo that shows a specific instant while others are like a movie that shows change over an extended period, which would have helped today.

Day 159: AP Test Day, Retakes, & Equilibrium

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AP Physics: AP Test Day

About two thirds of my students took the AP Physics 1 exam today, so my classes were smaller than usual. I gave them time on to work on their final projects and I cleaned up some lab equipment. I had a broken tumble buggy in my room that a student asked if he could take apart, and ended up getting it running again.

Physics: Retakes

Today was also the unofficial senior skip day, so my physics classes were pretty small, too. I gave students the opportunity to retake assessments in class today, though no one took me up on it. In one of my classes, I’d tried lighting a fire with a convex lens yesterday, but it was too cloudy, so we took advantage of today’s sunnier weather to get some more success.

Chemistry Essentials: Equilibrium

My chemistry class is only about one third seniors, so I actually got to do some teaching today! We did a lab with a reaction between iron nitrate and potassium thiocyanate to see what happened with various changes to shift the reaction equilibrium.

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Day 155: Whiteboarding, Refraction, & Quiz

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Tonight is our annual Relay for Life, so students were not at their most focused today.

AP Physics: Whiteboarding

The students who will be taking the AP Physics 1 exam next week whiteboarded problems from this year’s free response. Students needed more hints than I hoped to get started, but I think that was more to do with excitement over Relay than physics skills getting overly rusty. I still think it will be worth taking some time next week to revisit strategies for breaking down a problem.

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Physics: Refraction

After a quiz on ray diagrams, students did a qualitative lab on refraction, making observations of various objects in a clear cup of water and laser beams in a fish tank. Since the fish tank was out anyway, I also left one of my favorite critical angle demos set up.

 

Chemistry Essentials: Quiz

Students took their quiz on using an activity series to predict whether a single replacement reaction is likely. I also gave each student a printed copy of their current grade and we had some discussion about ways they can improve, especially retakes. My hope was students would work on preparing for retakes after they finished the quiz, but it didn’t pan out. I think a lot of it was simply because this was last hour on a beautiful spring Friday, with only a few hours to go until Relay for Life, but a few students expressed a lack of self-efficacy when it comes to their grade in this class; I need to keep working on how I can give students a sense of control over their learning in here.

 

Day 154: Resistivity, Ray Diagrams, & More Activity Series

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AP Physics: Resistivity

This year, I skipped over resistivity, so my students who took the AP Physics 1 exam last week had some trouble with free-response problem 2. Today, we took some time to look at the problem and discuss strategies for solving without any knowledge of resistivity. The students who took the test last week were very willing to share how they approached the problem, which was better than anything I could have said.

Physics: Ray Diagrams

Students worked through a worksheet on ray diagrams for pinholes. Students worked pretty quickly and confidently, so we had time to whiteboard answers for a gallery walk. There were some great conversations where students brought up their observations from the lab the past few days to decide whether their ray diagrams made sense.

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Chemistry Essentials: More Activity Series

Students worked on some additional problems identifying probably reactions using an activity series. I also had students predict the products of the reactions; since we haven’t done formula writing in a while, a lot of students needed a refresher. Once they got started, however, the problems quickly became pretty easy for students.

Day 153: Levitating Globe, Pinhole Viewers, & Hollow Pennies

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AP Physics: Levitating Globe

The approach I’ve fallen into in order to give students time for their final projects while embedding some review for the students who will be taking the AP Physics 1 exam on the make-up date. Today, I got out a globe that floats in a magnetic stand and asked students to predict what should happen to the reading on a balance when the globe is removed, an idea I got from Kelly O’Shea. One group did a thought experiment where the magnet was replaced with a spring supporting the globe to reason their answer and had a great conversation.
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Physics: Pinhole Viewers

We discussed some of the results of yesterday’s lab, focusing on how a ray diagram can explain the observations students made. Students are pretty quickly getting then hang of making sense of these diagrams.

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Chemistry Essentials: Hollow Pennies

Students did a conceptual lab practical on activity series today. I gave students an activity series for metals, then asked them to predict whether copper or zinc is more likely to react with hydrochloric acid. Then, I gave each student a penny with a wedge filed into it to test their prediction. I also showed students the hollow remnants of a penny that had been left in 12M hydrochloric acid for a few hours.

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Day 150: Final Project Work, Whiteboarding, & Quiz

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Its been a rough week, and I spaced out on taking pictures today.

AP Physics: Final Project Work

Students finalized their proposals for the final projects. A lot of students this year are interested in the idea of digging into a movie scene to see if the physics is realistic. I got out my copy of James Kakalios’ The Physics of Superheroes for interested students to take a look at since Kakalios does something similar with comic books.

Physics: Whiteboarding

Students whiteboarded selected problems from yesterday before taking their quiz on sound. A lot of students had trouble with a problem to determine whether an organ pipe is open or closed given the first three frequencies that produce standing waves; I think they weren’t connecting the sketches of standing waves we’ve been doing to the written problems.

Chemistry Essentials: Quiz

Students took a quiz on reaction types, as well as a second attempt at limiting reactant stoichiometry. Glancing over the quizzes, many of my stronger students relied heavily on particle diagrams, which is great to see. I need to keep working on helping all of my students connect those diagrams to the math.

Day 149: Final Project, Problems, & Whiteboarding

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AP Physics: Final Project

Students continued refining their proposals for the final project. Lots of students have ideas I’m really excited to see. A few students are working on ideas where it may be interesting to look at dissipated energy, so we got out the infrared camera to play a little. It turns out some glasses block a lot of IR.

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Physics: Problems

Students worked on some sound wave problems. Things seem to be clicking for most students.

Chemistry Essentials: Whiteboarding

We spent some time talking about the observations students made during yesterday’s lab and drawing explicit connections to the equation for the chemical reaction. My students don’t have a great sense for what certain chemicals look like, so it ended up being more teacher directed than I’d like. Students also weren’t sure when a chemical will show up as a gas, since I’ve dropped the subscript g in order to simplify the equations we’re looking at, but I’m not sure that is a useful simplification.

After the discussion (or, more accurately, lecture with student responses), student whiteboarded some limiting reactant problems. The students who were engaged made some good progress.

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This student asked me if I could write the symbols for sodium hydride and bromine oxide

Day 147: Test Day, Board Meeting, & Reaction Types

/ Marta R. Stoeckel / 1 Comment

Today was a strange day; a lot of students were impacted by some unexpected news last night.

AP Physics: Test Day

Today was the AP Physics 1 exam. However, we were able to give students the option of taking the make-up exam later this month and the majority of my students took this option. In my morning section, I’d planned to make today a game day for students to relax and have some fun before the exam, and decided to stick with that in both sections. Most students opted for some puzzles the calc teacher loaned me.

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Physics: Board Meeting

Students whiteboarded their results for yesterday’s speed of sound lab. The data came out very nice in both classes. Afterward, we had time for students to get the snakey springs out to start exploring wave superpositions. Even though I didn’t mention it in the prompts, one group got curious and tried to figure out whether the pulses reflect or pass through each other.

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Chemistry Essentials: Reaction Types

Classroom management gets tricky during labs with this class, so I decided to push back the lab I’d planned for today. Instead, I moved up a worksheet for students to practice identifying reaction types from chemical equations. One student was excited to show me an alternative representation she came up with for balancing chemical equations; its always exciting to not only have students coming up with their own ways of thinking about problems, but proud enough of their work to want to show it off.

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Day 146: Multiple Choice, Speed of Sound, & Whiteboarding

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AP Physics: Multiple Choice

With the AP exam tomorrow, I asked students which of several options they thought would be most useful and both classes requested we use Plickers to review multiple choice. Most students weren’t at their most focused today, but there were still some good discussions.

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Physics: Speed of Sound

Students worked on the classic speed of sound lab. Since several labs lately have been pretty rough, I structured the pre-lab discussion more like the way I do in September to get back to basics of experimental design and made sure sketches of the set-up made it onto the main whiteboard. I also took advantage of the fact that students have made other wavelength vs. frequency graphs to emphasize that students should graph as they go to see if their results make sense. My 1st hour got a lot farther than my 5th, but their slopes are coming out very nicely.

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Chemistry Essentials: Whiteboarding

The limiting reactant quiz last week did not go as well as I hoped, so we spent some time today whiteboarding a problem, emphasizing the role of particle diagrams. The students who were engaged seemed to get a lot out of the whiteboarding.

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