We're all about health. And science. Yeah

The other day, I stumbled across a fascinating post featuring a periodic table of the elements represented by cupcakes.

Here, have a gratuitous picture of the sugary goodness:



Nice, huh?

One of the things I have found in teaching chemistry, and, in particular, atomic structure, ion formation and ionic bonding, is that students have real difficulty with the idea that removing electrons makes an ion more positive.

Yes, I am also a maths teacher, and this does make me worried.

So, I'm thinking cupcakes of the first twenty and the few extras we use. Some nice icing. Valence electrons represented by little sour jube lollies - if you remove valence sour jubes, the cupcake gets sweeter. I think this could be a really simple, if not particularly healthy, way to get the idea across.

Bring on the Chemistry!

Every teacher is a literacy teacher

Apparently, science teachers are the only teachers that take this seriously. Of course, that was the opinion of one person, but I think I can say that my department, at least, takes literacy seriously.

I think, in our case, it's self-defence. We have an awful lot of specialist vocabulary and are so dependent on analogies and models that we need to be really proactive in teaching students how to read and interpret texts, how to read and interpret images, and how to construct their own meanings from texts and images.

That's one of the reasons I love visualisations like wordles, love visual dictionaries, and adore talking books online. But today, we did a classic collage with scissors and glue, with my Y11 class making analogies for cell structures. Another time, I would probably do this using online tools. Today, though, it was nice to get our fingers a bit dirty. And my students came up with some lovely analogies - like centipede legs for pili and baleen (as in whales) for the cell membrane.

Emo vampire bats and sexual reproduction (you are so predictable)

I want my students to make a comic, graphic novel or series of posters for sexual reproduction as part of genetics. I want them to hit four concepts: meiosis (cell division producing sex cells), fertilisation, DNA structure and replication, and genetic expression. So, since I have found that giving an instruction as wide open as that invariably leads to trouble, I made two posters as examples.

Here, the first two posters in my series: Emo Vampire Bats and Sexual Reproduction





I don't know about you, but I am pretty excited to see what my students come up with.

Investigative investigations and the relationship between the physical and living worlds

There are five strands to Science in the New Zealand Curriculum, four content strands and a Nature of Science strand that integrates and permeates the others. It's not always easy to integrate the strands, though I am always looking for opportunities to do so. Today, I had an awesome opportunity to integrate the Physical World and Living World strands.

We're studying forces and motion in Y11 science at the moment. I wanted a paper helicopter investigation activity, because helicopters are pretty damn awesome. But I discovered something better (using the amazing power of google, too) - an activity that uses four different helicopter designs based on seed pods (the twirly ones).

I immediately abandoned the idea of straightforward helicopters and embraced the idea of using four different designs. The learning I wanted my students to get today was partly to do with forces. It was also to do with fair tests and how to design them. But, above all, I wanted them to get the idea that we use models in science to test things. It's hard to get to the forest to study dispersal patterns of seeds? Can we simulate it in the laboratory using other things, with similar behaviour, to get a better idea of what we should be looking for when we do actually get to the forest?

Of my five groups, three were engaged and did a good job. One was fantastic and finished the whole thing, even the extension activity about baby spiders. One wasn't engaged at all, even with my fervent encouragement. I'm not too worried.

I took some photos, and I'm going to make a collage on the wall showing their work. I'm going through a real phase of documenting student work in photo form and displaying it.

Today's amazing feat of awesome!

Well, I haven't done it yet, but I shall.

Part of today is devoted to planning the Y11 Physics outline. We spend all of this term on Physics and I love it. Love it, I tell you! It's so much fun, at Y11, or should be fun. Y11 is where we learn the basic stuff, the stuff that rules our lives in the real world. Things like how forces act together to give a resultant force. How a body can have several forces acting on it but not be moving (that one blows the kids minds, even though it's something they have known since they were, oh, five, just from experience). How you can predict motion from the things that you know about a system. So. Much. Fun.

I have a whole pile of resources for this topic, and I am determined to use them to good effect. My students are going to inquire and think and learn if it kills them. One of the things that we are going to do is fair tests, and I will make the students do some of this online. I haven't quite decided how, yet, but I'm thinking that they might investigate experiments that other students have done and posted - like on that community on wikipedia that I can't remember the name of right now - and analyse them against a set of criteria for what NCEA defines as a fair test. Interesting? Well, I think it is.

Also on the table is the rewrite of the junior science curriculum. Fully integrated! With cross-curricula links! Nature of Science as a focus! Other stuff! It's going to be so much fun.

A stocktake of ICT in class

I know that lots of teachers at my school shake their heads and say that they can't use ICT, that there aren't enough applications for it, not enough ways to use it, it's not applicable and so on. So I took a snapshot of ICT usage a while ago and wrote myself a little table with the date, class and usage. I thought it might be interesting. It kind of is, partly as a little picture of what can be done, and partly (and worryingly) as a picture of how far I have to go until I am integrating ICT into my classroom practice to my own satisfaction. So, here is Feb 10th....

Y9 Science: used exploratree to record the results of a brainstorm into a diagram that can then be printed off. It would have been better with a wireless keyboard - or, even better, more computers so that it wasn't just kids calling out answers and me writing them in.

Y11 Science: used a youtube clip of a brainiac experiment of walking on custard in a states of matter experiment. You know, I'd love to give students more of a chance to give authentic responses to things like this, and to take part in real discussion. We have a youtube account, I must make more use of it

Y12 Physics: used a free Yenka resource and a youtube clip to demonstate electrostatic fields. This was done with the projector and me demonstrating, but I think it would have been far more effective for students to have viewed this in small groups at computer stations (or individually) and have shared their ideas and written their explanations collaboratively using the computer instead of me just talking to the animation/clip on the screen

So, three of four lessons that day had something simple in them. But there should be more. I should be thinking bigger, less demonstratively and more participatively. I'm going to come back to this idea, taking a snapshot - and hopefully, next time, not a month after the fact - and do it again to track how deep my ideas and techniques are getting.