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Ok, here's the drill. My school has each teacher pick a theme for the last week of school and gives them the same group of kids all week. I picked lab techniques and how to write a college level lab report. It was approved. I expected college bound students who have had chemistry. I got a bunch of 9th graders who are only there because mine was the only session open.
Given the enthusiasm of the administrators over my choice, I thought it was a good one. Apparently, the students did not agree as the students I was targeting, chose other sessions. I got the leftovers. The kids whose GPA's were not high enough to get their first or second choices. I am scrambling. I can't do any of what I planned and I now have to come up with interesting things to do this week to fill an entire week that teach to the state CCE's.
If you have any fun science activities that you do with your students that can be done on a shoestring, please pass them along. While I have the chemicals for all of the labs I had planned, I can't do those labs with these kids. They don't know the basics and I don't want to make this a long boring week of lectures on the background material they need to do the labs.
I'm looking for fun. For bubbles, fizzes, turns colors, you name it. I'm abandoning the idea of having a theme. It has now become how to have fun with chemistry/physics. Only I don't have 5, 7 hour days full of material to just pull out of my black bag and I have no funding to buy anything. Everything I buy will come out of my pocket.
I'm, especially, looking for edible labs. I hate having food in the lab but I can clean it and cover the tables. The two students who had me this year have requested the S'mores lab and balancing equations with candy, which will be good labs to do at the end of the day as a wrap up and something fun. I need three more of those. (Does anyone have a lab for making ice cream -freezing point depression that doesn't use glassware? I've heard that some teachers do this with baggies but I've never seen the instructions))
I'm also looking for chemistry/physics games that can be done by students who can't do math and can't spell molecule. The few I have are intended as review for material taught like periodic table battleship.
If I had computers, I could do things but the computers are being used by the students making up credits for classes they failed (the default option if you failed a class).
Thanks
Here's my list so far:
The gold penny lab from chemistry in the community
The S'mores lab
Balancing equations with candy molecules
Adhesion/cohesion with alcohol and water
Off to the races or who signed the note mystery - Paper chromotagrophy
Liquid chromatography
The acid factory lab from Wayne County RESA's website
Using pH indicators - simple exercise to rank liquids by pH
Calorimetry and/or Hess's law
Qualification and separation of ions (this is an AP chemistry lab but things precipitate, so they'll like it, and it takes a long time and I need time to fill. This is the only lab I remember from high school (back when the dionsaurs roamed the earth) and I was a D student. I loved it.)
I will probably do something on catapults (one of my physics students built a great one as her project and left it for me). We could use water balloons and see how far we can throw them or maybe make a game of it by splitting the class into teams and seeing which team can score the most points hitting a target area.
I need time fillers that are not boring. I will spend some time working on the elements of a good report (after all, some chemistry teacher will get these kids in two years) but I can't fill as much time as I, originally, planned with that one now. While that would have been high on a collge bound students list, it's not these student's radar. They just want to have fun. I'm tasked with teaching 5 CCE's a day.
Just to give you an idea of the level and expectations of my students. I had them do an observation lab (Copper II Chloride and aluminum foil - bubbles, fizzes, changes color...all the good stuff) and the first question a student asked me was "Do we get candy when we get done?" They've, apparently, been trained to expect candy when they finish assignments.
Last edited by Ivorytickler; 06-05-2010 at 06:03 AM..
I'm not a science teacher, but I looooved my high school physics class. Every month or so, we would do fun things like making bottle rockets out of soda bottles, making cushions to protect a raw egg that we dropped out of the second story window, etc. Once we had to figure out a way to mail the teacher a Pringles potato chip without having it break. (The only ones that didn't break were the ones that kids mailed in actual Pringles containers!)
I'm not a science teacher, but I looooved my high school physics class. Every month or so, we would do fun things like making bottle rockets out of soda bottles, making cushions to protect a raw egg that we dropped out of the second story window, etc. Once we had to figure out a way to mail the teacher a Pringles potato chip without having it break. (The only ones that didn't break were the ones that kids mailed in actual Pringles containers!)
What kind of materials did the teacher provide for the egg crate? I don't have second story windows but we could drop them from ceiling height and this sounds like something that would keep them occupied for a while. Occupied is good. Yesterday, I had $45 worth of glass demos that belonged to me broken because I was talking with one student while another grabbed something they shouldn't have.
Lesson 5 - Amazing Ice Cubes (30 to 60 min) - Mesmerise your class with a humble ice cube and a glass of cooking oil. Use this lesson as part of a unit on water or the properties of matter, or simply as a motivating activity.
Lesson 4 - Fizzy bubbly science (60 to 80 min) - Students investigate how popcorn kernels hitch a ride on bubbles of carbon dioxide produced by vinegar and baking soda. They see soap bubbles bounce and float on this heavy, invisible gas inside a softdrink bottle.
What kind of materials did the teacher provide for the egg crate? I don't have second story windows but we could drop them from ceiling height and this sounds like something that would keep them occupied for a while. Occupied is good. Yesterday, I had $45 worth of glass demos that belonged to me broken because I was talking with one student while another grabbed something they shouldn't have.
This is going to be a tough crowd.
Hmm... I know that mine was encased in styrofoam and it broke. LOL I can't remember what else there was... I want to say that we might have brought in things from home? I think I remember bringing in packing tape.
Lots of good examples here. My only suggestion is that just because they can't do college level write ups, that you can still stay in teh spirit of your original theme by bringing in the important aspects of experimentation and nature of science (dependent and independent variables, positive/negative controls, hypotheses are not proven true, logical fallacies, etc). Maybe have them design their own experiment (with your guidance and approval of materials, of course).
Lots of good examples here. My only suggestion is that just because they can't do college level write ups, that you can still stay in teh spirit of your original theme by bringing in the important aspects of experimentation and nature of science (dependent and independent variables, positive/negative controls, hypotheses are not proven true, logical fallacies, etc). Maybe have them design their own experiment (with your guidance and approval of materials, of course).
I am trying to stick with the themes. The three biggest being acids and bases, heat and solubility and separation. I am switching out labs to labs that are more visual and less cognitive. For example, we'll do the acid lake lab and simply arrange different solutions by pH instead of titrating and calculating concentrations of ions. We'll still work on writing reports just not college level ones.
They will get to design their own experiment, at least, twice. Once when we do projectiles (throwing this one in because they've made it clear they want to get outide sometimes and I had to scrap one of my biggest labs (Redox reactions is tough enough if you're college bound ). I'm going to divide them into teams and they'll get points for hitting targets drawn on the parking lot with water balloons and during the separations lab. The final portion of that lab is to figure out the identity of unknowns in a test tube.
Re: egg crates - When I did this with my middle schoolers, each set of partners was given the same items (it was the end of the year, so whatever I had enough of like styrofoam bowls, paper plates, etc.) plus they could each choose 1 item to bring from home. My 8th graders who had graduated earlier in the week came back to help. We did have a 2 story building; 6th grade did the drops from the top of the stairwell and 7th grade did the drops from the windows.
Very simple, quick, cheap, and incredibly basic - and not edible - but have you ever done the one where you add food coloring mixed w/vegetable oil to a cup of water? After a minute or 2, the food coloring (water soluble) will of course start separating from the oil and will make little streamers in the water. It is clearly not complicated nor high level, but might be something easy that you could use to help focus on the lab reports.
Also not a teacher but I was a science major (for what that's worth!!) How about a CSI theme with fingerprints, invisible ink and the like? They could solve a mystery of some sort.
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). I'm going to divide them into teams and they'll get points for hitting targets drawn on the parking lot with water balloons and during the separations lab. The final portion of that lab is to figure out the identity of unknowns in a test tube.
