Summary Week 1

This week our 8th grade teachers (myself included) tried hard to channel our inner Dave Burgess (via Teach Like a Pirate). We started our first day in class by having kids create models (tying a little to a science concept) using playdough. In retrospect, it was hard to get this done well in the shortened amount of class time that we had due to our revised beginning week bell schedule. I tried to take a picture of each kids creation but honestly didn't get them all.  It would have been ideal if we could have kept the each of the creations however, we had to reuse the playdough.  I made 6 batches of of playdough (http://theimaginationtree.com/2012/04/best-ever-no-cook-play-dough-recipe.html). We have about 350 8th graders so I don't know if it would have been feasible for us to not reuse the playdough. (You can see my first day post to see a couple more pictures of what kids created.

  


Our 2nd day of class was having students work in a group to create structures using 20 pieces of spaghetti and about 60 cm of tape to try and create the tallest structure possible. I thought this was going to be more of a hit than I think it was. Some of the groups didn't want to try to build anything or seemed to not have any ideas about how to go about this. Some of this is could be due to my explanation/selling of this activity. I did wonder if part of the roughness was because we weren't following the first day "rules". Some of our 8th graders seem jaded towards school (how sad..), they have been through this drill before and know that the 1st couple of days not much is expected of them except to be compliant and listen. When we bucked the trend and asked them to do something very different they didn't know how to respond.

Day 3 and 4 was a little more traditional, I did a mapping activity where students had to find the safety equipment and classroom materials. Upon reflection, maybe I could have done this as a treasure hunt with clues and a map. I would have to really think about how you could make this work successfully without having established the classroom procedures that I usually use for materials management, behavior expectations etc. Friday we put together our interactive notebooks.

On Thurs, 6th graders did a penny lab where they were asked to count the number of water drops that could be placed on a penny. Teachers at this grade level were waited a little longer to have a hands-on activity. Two out of three are new to teaching science and I think are very concerned about the differences between science and their previous content areas.

On Thurs and Fri, 7th graders completed the helicopter lab that gave a brief introduction to independent & dependent variable.