It has been a crazy year folks! The blog was totally neglected as I finished my masters, planned a wedding, and oh you know taught. :-) I have had a great year with these students. I learned a lot from them and I hope they can say the same for me. That being said, I am very excited about what my summer holds. I am getting married later in June, and teaching science at a "Summer Bridge" program for rising ninth graders identified as at risk. We will be teaching the curriculum I helped develop last summer through Kenan Fellows and Students Discover AND we will be taking weekly field trips to the museum! They didn't think they could get rid of me that easily did they?
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In the past two weeks we have been studying the Periodic Table of Elements and we are moving in to chemical reactions as the week closes out. We completed a puzzle called the Alien Periodic Table. In order to complete this activity students had to use clues about elements from a distant planet and their knowledge of the periodic table to sort these "alien elements" into a periodic table.
On Friday of this week students presented a research project on the elements. They were assigned one element to research and present to the class. Monday through Thursday we talked about chemical and physical changes. The class created "post-it tweets" about the difference between chemical and physical changes. Gibby (our class pet) tweeted some of the best responses. On Thursday we observed some chemical reactions between acetic acid and sodium bicarbonate. Click HERE to see pictures from the lab! PERIODICALLY!Oh, I crack myself up. We started studying the periodic table of elements this week. We have done a great deal of coloring and labeling in our interactive notebooks. We also made use of our iPads so that students could work in groups to color and label their periodic tables.
This week we continued our study of matter by taking a look at atoms and atomic symbols. Thanks for sending in supplies for our Dots Atomic Models lab. The students had fun constructing atoms using the different colored candies to represent protons, neutrons and electrons.
This week we dove head first in to the world of MATTER! Monday and Tuesday we took notes on key vocabulary words and the basics of elements, compounds and mixtures. We began to talk about what it means for atoms to be chemically combined versus physically combined. Students used blocks to model these concepts in an activity pictured here. Starting the 2014-2015 school year off right!The first two weeks in Ms. Evans class have been spent learning WMMS rules and procedures and learning reviewing Scientific Method and Lab Safety Rules. In class we reviewed Lab Safety by watching a Lego Music video and wrote a story about a science classroom gone wrong. Later we discussed the process of thinking that all scientists use when designing and carrying experiments. We spent some time talking about the process that I was involved in while studying the face mites this summer. I think it is safe to say that the students are very interested and a little grossed out by these little guys that hang out on our faces. We put our new process knowledge to work by investigating bubble gum in a lab on Wednesday and Thursday of this week. Students were asked to predict what would happen to the mass of the gum after they chewed it for a certain amount of time. Many students were surprised that their initial hypotheses were incorrect and need to think critically about what could have changed about the gum chemically to produce these results. The 2013-2014 school year is coming to a close and we have had a great year! I have enjoyed teaching this group of kids and they have taught me a lot too. I wish all of my students from this year the best, and good luck in high school!
One of my goals this year was to keep an updated site with information about my classroom. I have done a good job keeping assignments and notes updated but as for posts about what we are doing I'm falling behind! Here's a catch up post to show what we have done so far in second quarter. We are having a lot of fun with our disease unit! Students have researched the difference between pandemics and epidemics, learned about some famous outbreaks in history and used their knowledge to create diseases to infect the world in an online game. Wow! Where did the time go?!? I feel like school just started. My classes have been busy this quarter working away at learning the basics of chemistry and the periodic table. Here are some pictures of some of the fun activities we have done so far. Know a middle-school girl who loves science? Send her to Girls in Science at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences! This intensive 8-week program for 6th- and 7th-grade girls provides opportunities for hands-on science exploration at the Museum and in the great outdoors. We are currently accepting applications for the fall session (Oct-Dec). All applications due by 5 pm, September 16. For more information and to apply, visit: http://naturalsciences.org/programs-events/gisconnect. Questions? Contact Kathryn Fromson at [email protected] or 919-707-9951.
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Author8th Grade Science Teacher at West Millbrook Middle School Archives
June 2015
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