Instructional Strategies

Day 157: Senior Skip Day & Mistakes Whiteboarding

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AP Physics 1 & Physics: Senior Skip Day

Today was senior skip day, so only a few of my students were in class. Most of the AP students opted to work on their final project and some of the Physics students started reviewing for the final.

Chemistry Essentials: Mistakes Whiteboarding

We did some mistakes whiteboarding with problems for nuclear decay. I had a few students ask how we know alpha particles are always helium-4, which got me wondering if there’s a better way I could introduce the types of nuclear decay we study than just giving some notes on the types of decay we’ll be using.

nuke decay.jpg

 

 

Day 156: Final Project Work & Whiteboarding

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AP Physics 1: Final Project Work

Students continued working on their final projects. One group is working on how the speed of a basketball affects the rebound of a backboard. They were working on some energy bar charts today and came up with some interesting notation; they labeled their kinetic energy blocks with “H” and “V” to keep track of how the components of the velocity were changing and how that fit with the energy.

Physics: Mirror Calculations Gallery Walk

Students did a gallery walk of yesterday’s problems. My sub from yesterday commented on how well they’d collaborated on the problems, so I was surprised that my students felt very lost on the problems. Once we started whiteboarding, it was clear they knew how to do the problems, but just weren’t confident yet.

I’ve also been randomly assigning groups almost every day, and I’ve come to enjoy the first few minutes of whiteboarding. Students immediately start comparing answers and approaches with the other people in their group and have lots of great conversation about similarities and differences in their work.

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Chemistry Essentials: Nuclear Notation Gallery Walk

Students whiteboarded yesterday’s problems translating between different representations of an isotope for a gallery walk. Afterward, we started working on some problems writing out nuclear reactions for alpha and beta decay. I wish the decay problems started with some where the nucleus is reasonable to draw to help make identifying the products of the decay more concrete.

chem nuke.jpg

Day 154: Final Projects, Mistakes Whiteboarding, & Nuclear Structure PhET

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AP Physics 1: Final Projects

Students continued to work on their final projects. I have one group that’s interested in finding a way to measure the rate my Van de Graaff generator builds up charge. They spent some time today experimenting with ways to indirectly measure the charge.

Physics: Ray Diagram Mistake Whiteboarding

Students did some mistakes whiteboarding with ray diagrams for curved mirrors. Several students commented on mistakes they thought were especially helpful or interesting, which made me feel really good about the culture I try to build in my class. Students were also sad when they realized this will be their last round of mistakes whiteboarding in high school.

ray mistake.jpg

Chemistry Essentials: PhET Nuclear Structure

Students used PhET’s Build an Atom simulation to experiment with nuclear structure to kick of our nuclear chemistry unit. A lot of the information was a review from the first half of the course, but most needed a refresher.

phet atom.PNG

Day 153: Final Projects, Ray Diagrams, & Whiteboarding

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AP Physics 1: Final Projects

Students continued work on their final projects. One group wants to figure out the charge vs. time function for my Van de Graaff generator. All three students in the group have different predictions for what that function will look like, which lead to some debates with lots of great thinking.

Physics: Ray Diagrams

Students finished working on some ray diagrams for curved mirrors and prepped whiteboards for some mistakes whiteboarding on Monday. Yesterday, a lot of students got frustrated when the rays didn’t meet perfectly or when they had to use virtual rays, but I think a lot of that resolved today.

Chemistry Essentials: Reaction Types Whiteboarding

As a quick refresher before today’s quiz, I gave students a fairly long worksheet, then had them pick out one example of each reaction type to put on a whiteboard. One student showed me how he’s been splitting the formulas in single replacement and double replacement reactions to relate back to general forms like AB + CD → AD + BC.

reaction types splitting

Day 152: Final Projects, Board Meeting, & Activity Series Practical

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AP Physics 1: Final Projects

Final project proposals are due tomorrow, so students worked on finalizing their topic. I got to have a lot of fun conversations today to help students narrow down their topic. One student had picked out a clip from The Cat in the Hat but wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with it, so we spent some time talking about the physics involved.

Physics: Curved Mirror Board Meeting

We whiteboarded the results of yesterday’s lab to get to the mirror equation.

curved mirror board.jpg

Chemistry Essentials: Activity Series Practical

Students got a pre-1982 penny and a post-1982 penny, each with a wedge cut to expose the insides, and used an activity series to predict which would react with hydrochloric acid.

pennies in hcl.jpg

Day 151: Final Project Work, Curved Mirrors Round 2, & Gallery Walk

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AP Physics 1: Final Project Work

Students continued working on their final projects. One group that is also in AP Computer Science is planning to write a program to model the motion of a soccer ball got excited when they realized they can change gravity in their project.

Physics: Curved Mirrors Round 2

The data from yesterday’s lab was pretty rough, so we used a simulation from The Physics Classroom to collect some idealized data. Students prepped their boards, but we ran out of time for the board meeting.

phys mirror wb.jpg

Chemistry Essentials: Gallery Walk

We did a gallery walk to go over the answers to yesterday’s problems using an activity series to predict whether a single replacement reaction is likely.

chem Sr wb.jpg

Day 149: Free Response, Curved Mirrors, & Activity Series

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AP Physics 1: Free-Response

The 2019 free response were released last Thursday. I always have some students interested in discussing the problems, so I offered to go through my solutions with interested students today. The students who opted into the discussion said they struggled in the spots I expected them to, but felt really good about the rest of the problems. We’ll see for sure in July!

Physics: Curved Mirrors

We discussed the results of Friday’s lab, especially some rough ray diagrams I had students sketch. We also got a nice visual of the focal point using a big concave mirror, a ray box that fires several laser beams, and some chalk dust.

Chemistry Essentials: Activity Series

Students combined several different metals and nitrates to rank the reactivity of the metals. One of the reactions is fairly subtle, but students did a nice job of recognizing what was being produced in each reaction.

activity series.jpg

Day 147: Brainstorming, Laser Security System, & Reaction Types Lab

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AP Physics 1: Brainstorming

I introduced students to their final project, which is to pick something they are interested in and explain or describe some aspect of it using physics we’ve learned this year, then go collect some data as a way to test or expand their explanation. Today, students mostly played with potential ideas and used some of the physics we’ve learned to start exploring.

Physics: Laser Security System

I borrowed the design challenge from an EngrTEAMS optics unit and had students use plan mirrors to design a room for a museum with a laser security system. Students got into the task and we used the Mission Impossible theme as background music.

laser security system.jpg

Chemistry Essentials: Reaction Types Lab

Students did a lab where they got to see each of the five reaction types first hand. I’d like to edit the worksheet I have for the lab to have students make more explicit connections between their observations and the balanced equation.

rxn types lab.jpg

Day 146: Exam Debrief & Mistakes Whiteboarding

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AP Physics 1: Exam Debrief

A lot of my students were gone today for the AP Literature exam. I took some time to introduce the final project students will be working on, then we talked a little about how they felt the AP Physics 1 exam went. Most students felt better about the free response than the multiple choice, which is pretty consistent with what I’ve heard from past years.

Physics: Mirror Mistakes

We did some mistakes whiteboarding with ray diagrams for plane mirrors and students pretty quickly got the hang of the diagrams. One student declared we need a song for mistakes whiteboarding; I’ll be sure to update if we come up with one.

mirror mistakes.jpg

Chemistry Essentials: Reaction Types Mistakes

We did mistakes whiteboarding with some problems for recognizing different reaction types. Students were very successful at making sense of these problems and I hat pretty minimal intervention.

chem mistake.jpg

Day 144: Lab Practical, Board Meeting, & Lego Reaction Types

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AP Physics 1: Lab Practical

Today was our last day of regular class before the AP exam. We worked on a lab practical where students figure out where to drop an unrolling toilet paper roll so that it will hit the ground as a roll that is simply dropped. I’ve got a worksheet where I added some questions to hit most of the topics from mechanics. I didn’t have any groups finish, but they did a lot of good thinking.

 

Physics: Plane Mirror Board Meeting

Students whiteboarded their results from Friday’s plane mirror lab. Several groups had some trouble distinguishing between units and variables in their equation because they were thrown off by the unitless slope, but we were able to work through it.

phys mirror board meeting.jpg

Chemistry Essentials: Lego Reaction Types

Students did a lab manipulating cubes to go from the reactants to the products for the major types of reactions we are learning to reinforce what is going on at the particle level. I usually use Legos, but forgot to ask a colleague to bring them in, so we pulled out the Mathlink cubes.

reaction types legos.jpg