Yesterday was a staff conference day where we looked at differentiation and came up with some interesting tweeks on how we practice.
Stage 1 Physics – the tute time as three of our number are unable to attend this particular lesson. As we didn’t have a lesson yesterday we had to look at new material which I posted on edmodo for those who couldn’t be there. We looked at vector and scalar quantities particularly focusing on distance/displacement and speed/velocity. We examined some graphs of 1 D motion until we could identify clearly what was happening to the moving body in each case. We started to look at some of the questions I put up on edmodo and now can use the average velocity formula pretty convincingly and convert between km/h and m/s.
10 F Science – We got far more organised around our “how fast is my hotwheels’ investigation to the point where all present collected distance/time data and used it to find the speed of their car – averaging as usual to reduce the impact of random errors. There were also some weird and wonderful tracks created which weren’t quite part of what we were doing. Next part, after doing some analysis, is for students to work out a method of finding whether the car’s speed is constant after it leaves the track. We’ve already carried out a similar investigation with battery powered cars and I plan to scaffold carefully to allow them to be successful. Looks like we might miss tomorrow’s lesson due to our special assembly.
8 Science – We reviewed and added to the practical reports from the investigation carried out last Friday. About half the class produced good reports, the others were slapdash and didn’t follow the practice we’d done earlier. I had written detailed information for them about what they needed to do so when I pick them up on Friday I hope to see improvement. I’ll have to repeat this process a few times before they’ll regularly prepare quality reports. The rest of the lesson we investigated energy changes through a round of short investigations. We had a steam engine, a lemon, water turbine, solar panel, and hand generator producing electricity, creating heat and light and using them to create other forms of energy and we had vehicles converting potential energy into kinetic. Students answered some questions about the energy they saw at each investigation before moving on. Some had favourites and spent a long time at them. I had to keep moving so no photos. Their homework is to describe an energy conversion device at home.
Colin, I’m really enjoying your blog aimed at the parents of your students. In particular, I like the fact that it gives me, as the Science Coordinator, a chance to find out what’s going on in your classes. It gives me an overall sense of all the good work you do. I hope we can use this as a template for others to follow.
Thanks Shane, I still have to get the message out to most of the parents about this blog. It works well for me as a reflection tool rather than the planning tool which is what I’m supposed to be using the other blog for. Checked out Alice Leung’s blog. Not in detail. I like the idea of gamification but as a total non-gamer I struggle with the ideas for creating the game.