1st Four Days

How can time fly so quickly? On day one we had orientation with the students throughout the morning, spent a full hour with 4th period, ran a shortened bell schedule so that all students were seen by their teachers, and finally had a pep rally to celebrate the end of day 1. It was a long day but exciting at the same time...I showed my fourth period class some of my entries from the blog and the wiki that I have set up and we watched some YouTube videos that I had previously downloaded. The kids really seemed to enjoy it.

Day 2: All classes all period...I started the kids out this year with a Power Teaching rules lesson and even today (day 4) the students know the rules. Then we did the apple observation lab and the kids really really loved it. More than one kid commented that he had not ever thought about people in other countries possibly not knowing what an apple is because they might not be grown there or imported.

Day 3: We went over the apple observation lab, and did a Ghost Crystal lab. Now you know yor really score as a teacher when a student tells his or her friends "DUDE! THIS IS WHY I LOVE SCIENCE! This year I was prepared for follow up what if experiments. Like one student wanted to know what would happen in a ghost crystal was placed in Kool-Aid. We ended up testing vegetable oil, salt water, and sugar water. It was SO worth the extra effort. I then did a disappearing beaker trick where I poured Wesson Oil into a 1000mL beaker after first placing a smaller beaker inside it. The students were asked to record their observations and even after being fooled by the ghost crystals they didn't observe the beaker so they were fooled twice in one class period and that really stunned them.

Day 4: Today I rested a bit and used a Safety Symbol Search that I "borrowed" from Eboni. While it was a worksheet, because the students had to really stretch their imaginations I think they learned something........

Well, tomorrow I will be eating candles. So, I will have someone take pictures and I will post those.