Day 145: Review, Whiteboarding, & Legos

May 4, 2018 / Marta R. Stoeckel / 3 Comments

AP Physics: Review

A lot of my students will be taking the AP Chem exam on Monday, so it was the last time the whole class was together before Tuesday’s AP Physics 1 exam. One class asked if we could spend the whole hour on multiple choice, so we worked through a bunch of problems I’d loaded into Plickers. My other section asked for more time to work on the 2017 free response problems, so they got into small groups for that after 20 minutes of multiple choice practice.

Physics: Whiteboarding

Students whiteboarded some of the problems we’ve been working on prior to taking a quiz. A few students have started talking in terms of patterns for the number of notes and anti-nodes which is great. Students are also seeing the diagrams as a tool in ways they have not with previous types of diagrams.

Chemistry Essentials: Lego Reaction Types

Students used Legos to represent ions in chemical reactions to get a better understanding of the different reaction types. Manipulating the blocks seemed to help students get a sense of how the ions are rearranging in a chemical reaction and tie some meaning to the terms from yesterday. I’m wondering if this lab could be reworked to start the unit and motivate the language, rather than simply being an opportunity to practice the terms.

Day 144: Choice Labs, Tuning Forks, & Reaction Types Reading

May 3, 2018 / Marta R. Stoeckel / Leave a comment

AP Physics: Choice Labs

Today, I set up kits for a variety of labs targeting different topics and had students pick which labs to complete. I also had one last set of free-response problems, and most groups picked to work on those rather than the labs. I think they see a clearer link between the written problems and the test than they see between the labs and the test. In one of my classes, several students left their lab group to go talk to a peer they see as an expert on a topic they wanted to work on, which was awesome.

Physics: Tuning Forks

Students did a lab playing with tuning forks and singing glasses to start building some ideas about sound. This was the most animated I’ve seen my students this tri, which was a lot of fun. Students also made some great observations; one noticed that when a tuning fork vibrates in water, the water shoots mostly to the sides and use that to help justify which way the tuning fork vibrates.

Chemistry Essentials: Reaction Types Reading

We got out the textbooks for students to start building some vocabulary for different types of reactions. I could tell students weren’t latching on to the vocabulary in the same way they do when we establish a concept before the language. Tomorrow, we’ll be doing an activity using Legos to practice recognizing the different reaction types, but I wonder if there is a way I can rework the Lego activity to put it first and motivate naming different types of reactions.

Day 142: Mistakes Game, Standing Waves, & Lab Results

May 1, 2018 / Marta R. Stoeckel / Leave a comment

AP Physics: Mistakes Game

We spent about 15 minutes using Plickers to discuss some multiple choice from the practice test students took last week, then started working on the 2016 free response. Students started prepping whiteboards that we’ll use for the mistakes game tomorrow. Most groups got to the point where they felt they had a good solution on their whiteboard, so will need a few minutes tomorrow to add a mistake.

ap fr mistake.jpg

Physics: Standing Waves

We got out the singing rod to reason out what must be the pattern for standing waves on a resonator free to vibrate at both ends, then students started working on some problems. A lot of students struggled to relate wavelength to the length of the resonator, in part because many of them were looking for a specific equation rather than using the diagrams the worksheet asked for as a reasoning tool. I need to think about how I can help students see the value of their diagrams tomorrow.

singing rod.jpg

Chemistry Essentials: Lab Wrap-Up

The copper from yesterday’s lab needed some time to dry, so today students got the mass and worked on their calculations. A lot of groups had balled up their aluminum foil yesterday, which lead to some big chunks of unreacted foil, even for groups where it should have been the limiting reactant. This ended up being a great opportunity for students to use a particle model for chemical reactions to think through why that happened.

dried cu.jpg

Day 141: Free Response, Longitudinal Waves, & Limiting Reactant Lab

April 30, 2018April 30, 2018 / Marta R. Stoeckel / 1 Comment

AP Physics: Free Response

Students whiteboarded some released free-response problems, then reviewed their work with a scoring guide and presented to the rest of the class. We spent some time discussing the patterns in the scoring guide, like making sure you articulate every detail to get all the points. I especially made sure we spent some time discussing the experimental design problem from this set; a lot of students have been coming up with fairly complicated experiments on these problems, so we looked at the kind of simple approaches that can be very effective.

Physics: Longitudinal Waves

Students played with slinkies to see if what we’ve figured out about transverse waves so far works for longitudinal. A lot of groups got tripped up by the wording of my question on whether the relationship we previously found between wavelength and frequency still works. I think a lot of it is I’m having trouble getting across to students this year what I mean by a relationship between two variables.

Chemistry Essentials: Limiting Reactants Lab

Students did a reaction between aluminum foil and a solution of copper (II) chloride dihydrate. I assigned each group to use a different set of masses for their reactants so that different groups would have different limiting reactants. There was a pretty dramatic difference in the color of the solution at the end, which made for a pretty cool visual of the limiting reactant. Time got tight, though; next time, I need to spend about half a period pre-labbing, then get students actually doing the lab the next day. For this course, it could also be good to simply ask students to come up with an explanation for why different groups have different colored solutions without asking students to do the number crunching.

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Day 139: Free Response, Standing Waves, & Whiteboarding

April 26, 2018 / Marta R. Stoeckel / Leave a comment

AP Physics: Free Response

We are starting to review proper for the AP Physics 1 exam. Today, I gave students the 2015 free response and asked each group to sign up for a problem they will become the experts on. There was lots of good discussion about reading carefully and parsing what the question is really asking.

Physics: Standing Waves

We got out the wave generator and a strobe light to get a few more ideas in place about standing waves. The strobe light helped a lot with talking about the particle motion since it became possible to track the movement of the string.

Chemistry Essentials: Whiteboarding

We spent some time whiteboarding yesterday’s problems. We spent a lot of time on the first problem, which had nice whole number mole ratios, so we could look at how the particle diagrams show what math needs to be done.

Day 138: Tic Tac Bounce, Board Meeting, & Problems

April 25, 2018 / Marta R. Stoeckel / Leave a comment

AP Physics: Tic Tac Bounce

As part of the toilet paper practical, I asked students to calculate the final velocity of their unwinding roll using a v-t graph and using an LOL diagram. The discrepancy between the two velocities prompted some good discussion, which lead nicely into Kelly O’Shea’s bouncing Tic Tac demo and the idea of rotational kinetic energy.

Physics: Board Meeting

Students whiteboarded their data from the snakey spring lab. There were still more groups than I’d like who had results that were definitely not an inverse relationship between wavelength and frequency. The big problem seems to be in finding the frequency; we haven’t made much use of that term, so I think students are not attaching much conceptual meaning to it, in spite of the pre-lab discussions. We also didn’t do as much as I usually do with position vs. time graphs for simple harmonic motion, which seems to be making wavelength a tough concept to grasp. Next year, I need to rethink my unit on springs and pendulums to build a better foundation.

Chemistry Essentials: Limiting Reactant Problems

Students worked on some written limiting reactant problems. It was a much tougher leap than in past years; this class isn’t as comfortable with using particle diagrams as a tool for thinking, and I think that made limiting reactants feel more like something new than a natural step in what we’ve been doing.

Day 137: Toilet Paper Practical, Snakey Springs, & Limiting Reactant Hardware

April 24, 2018 / Marta R. Stoeckel / Leave a comment

AP Physics: Toilet Paper

Students finished working on the lab practical we started yesterday. Students did a lot of connecting ideas, which was great. I added a question asking students to calculate the final velocity of their unrolling roll using the velocity time graph and using energy, which I’m hoping to use to introduce rotational kinetic energy tomorrow.

Physics: Snakey Springs

My plan was to whiteboard yesterday’s lab, but most groups had either a linear or quadratic relationship between wavelength and frequency; a lot of students seemed distracted during yesterday’s pre-lab discussion, and I should have taken the time to bring their focus back rather than plowing ahead. We took a few minutes to talk about whether the graphs groups have make sense, then revisited the pre-lab discussion and re-did the data collection. I’ve had some other labs this tri we needed to re-do because of poor results, so I need to think about how to do a better job of making sure the lab goes well the first time around.

Turns out my heavy ring stands work well for holding one end of a snakey spring

Chemistry Essentials: Limiting Reactants Hardware

We revisited the nuts, bolts, and washers and the “reaction” used to introduce stoichiometry to explore more with limiting reactants. I had a few students who were bothered that there isn’t a simple rule they can always use to immediately identify the limiting reactant, but they were still able to see the kinds of approaches I wanted them to.

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Day 136: Toilet Paper, Snakey Springs, & Limiting Reactants

April 23, 2018 / Marta R. Stoeckel / 1 Comment

AP Physics: Toilet Paper

I started by having students whiteboard some model summaries. I started with linear motion, then asked students to add the angular version of each representation. This seemed to help students draw connections between linear and angular motion. Afterward, students started working on a lab practical to predict where to start an unrolling roll of toilet paper so it hits the ground at the same time as a toilet paper roll dropped from a given height.

Physics: Snakey Springs

To introduce waves, students played around with snakey springs to look for ways to change the behavior of the waves and get some data for a relationship between wavelength and frequency. Today was one of the first days it was 60 degrees all day and there wasn’t much snow on the ground, so I took the lab outside and a lot of students used sidewalk chalk to help with their measurements. There were also some good observations of the shadows; one group making cycloid waves noticed their shadow looked the same as the shadow for 2D waves.

Chemistry Essentials: Limiting Reatants

Students used a PhET simulation to start building some ideas about limiting reactants. The class was much rowdier than usual; the class meets the last period of the day, and I think the nice weather was making a lot of them restless. The concrete visualizations did seem to help a lot of students start making sense of limiting reactants.

Day 135: Whiteboarding

April 20, 2018 / Marta R. Stoeckel / Leave a comment

AP Physics: Angular Momentum

Students whiteboarded yesterday’s problems. There was a lot of good discussion; I think rotation is starting to click for a lot of students. I also did a few demos, including one with an RC motorcycle inspired by a Evel Knievel statement prior to a jump over the Snake River Canyon that his biggest fear was accidentally letting go of the gas while in mid-air.

Physics: Oscillating Particle Whiteboarding

Students whiteboarded yesterday’s problems. The connections between the math and the big ideas seem to be clicking for a lot of students. One of the questions we discussed is whether the angle of a ramp should affect the period of a cart oscillating on a spring, so I set up the demonstration.

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Chemistry Essentials: Percent Yield

I kept the whiteboarding pretty short since a quiz on percent yield was also on deck for today and the para working with the class had let me know that students had done very well with the problems. We targeted a couple of trouble spots, like a problem where a lot of students dropped a decimal point yesterday, leading to over 800% yield. I was really pleased that students recognized why that was not a reasonable answer, even if they had trouble finding the error.

Day 134: Problems Galore

April 19, 2018 / Marta R. Stoeckel / Leave a comment

I had a sub today, so no pictures. All three of my classes worked on problems.

AP Physics: Angular Momentum

I gave students some angular momentum problems. Its been a while since we hit linear momentum hard, so I’ll be curious to see how it went shaking the dust off and translating to angular scenarios. I also threw in some torque problems; on the last quiz, a lot of students weren’t sure what an extended free-body diagram is, so that is something I needed to make sure to revisit.

Physics: Springs & Pendulums

Students did some problems using the equations for the period of a spring and period of a pendulum. Earlier this week, some students were having trouble distinguishing the two formulas, but I think the lab practicals helped. I’m hoping that shows up in how the problems went.

Chemistry Essentials: Percent Yield

Students did some percent yield problems. They look very similar to the stoichiometry problems we’ve been doing, with a step added at the end to calculate percent yield. When I got to school for parent-teacher conferences, I was able to connect with my sub and the para who supports the class, and both told me the problems went very well for the majority of students; they are seeing the connections between what we’ve done previously and the new material. The para also reminded me I need to crack down on students showing their work; a lot of students are frustrated because looking back at their old work isn’t helpful, but they don’t yet see that writing out their work would change that.