Classroom Activities

Classroom activities on the atmosphere

November 23, 2010

Teaching about the atmosphere?  Here are a few ideas for the classroom. Activities about the atmosphere are particularly well suited for talking about air pressure, since air pressure is essentially the weight of the atmosphere pushing down on us.  At the Exploratorium we had a couple of really great activities to get at this idea. [...]

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Hands-on activities for string theory and dark matter

November 8, 2010

There is a dreadful lack of good material for high school physics courses on modern physics — you know, the stuff after Newton?  String theory and dark matter and particle physics?  Yet, this is the stuff that inspires people to go into science — the unsolved mysteries, the new applications of old theories, or even [...]

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Science activities for Halloween! (Repost)

October 18, 2010

This is a repost from October 2009. Enjoy! With halloween fast approaching, it’s time to take advantage of a frivolous holiday to do some fun science stuff. No post about Halloween would be complete without a reference to the Grossology site. Scroll down for “lab activities”: This gets high marks from one teacher who says, [...]

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Turn your iPhone into a microscope

September 9, 2010

How cool is this?  That image, below, was taken with a iPhone with a cheap microscope attached onto the camera.  Stunning!  Thanks to Crabfu for creating it, and to Teach42 for bringing my attention to it.

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Teacher-tested climate change lessons

August 26, 2010

I was excited to see this recent posting from my institution, CU Boulder. If you’re a teacher looking to teach climate change in the classroom, a group of scientists, science education researchers, and middle and high-school teachers have developed and refined a set of problem-based lessons: Visit them at LearnMoreAboutClimate.colorado.edu They say: The result is [...]

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Facing Facebook: Social media in and out of the classroom

August 21, 2010

Your students are already using tools like Facebook and Twitter. In fact, they’re often using them when you’d rather they’d be doing something else (like paying attention in class). How can we turn the potential obstacles of Web 2.0 and social media into an opportunity for effective teaching and learning? I recently gave an overview [...]

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Students playing the “classroom” game can give silly answers (#aaptsm10)

July 20, 2010

Another post on today’s sessions at the AAPT… In one talk on “epistemological priming” (Paul Hutchison, Grinnell), he made a compelling case for the fact that students aren’t using their everyday reasoning in physics class.  He asked them the question, “If you throw a ball horizontally, and a ball straight down, which will hit the [...]

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Student reasoning in tutorials (#AAPTsm10)

July 20, 2010

I’m at the American Association of Physics Teachers meeting, and will be trying to liveblog some of my observations from sessions while I’m here.  The absence of wireless may dampen the true “live”-ness of the liveblog, but I’ll aim for semi-live blogging – ie., I’ll post stuff from my hotel at night, before I collapse [...]

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Web 2.0 in the classroom (#ISTE10)

July 4, 2010

I wanted to let you know about a blog post that I recently created over at The Active Class, on the use of blogs and wikis in K12 classrooms. There are some nice summaries of one small research study that looked at what worked (and what didn’t) in teachers’ uses of these tools, with some [...]

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Summer Science Clubs: Avoiding summer “brain-mush” syndrome for kids

July 4, 2010

This is a post geared more towards parents than teachers because, after all, parents are the ultimate teachers, right?  It’s summer, and kids get to turn their brains off for three months.  Well, mostly.  Connie “The Science Club Mom” shares her experiences on how to do some fun science projects for kids as part of [...]

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Powerpoint Meets Chalk: Ubiquitous Presenter

June 15, 2010

I blog on using technology to enhance student engagement over at The Active Class. My most recent post was about Ubiquitous Presenter — a free way to add interactive ink to your slides.  Here is an excerpt: When the screen lights up, students take it as a cue to tune out.  We’ve all had this [...]

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Ideas for teaching the phases of the moon

April 27, 2010

A while back, a teacher on a listserv asked for some ideas and resources for teaching the science of the phases of the moon.  Veteran teacher Eric Plett shared this great hands-on activity that I thought merited a blog post of its own. 1.  Darken your room and get a bright light source like an [...]

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Water bottle xylophone (repost)

March 16, 2010

If you fill a glass bottle partway with water, and hit it with a spoon, you’ll hear a pitch. If you dump out some of the water, and hit it again, you’ll get a higher pitch. Less water, higher pitch. That’s because the frequency of sound is related to how quickly the sound wave can [...]

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Will it sink or float? Soda cans and density.

February 26, 2010

Many teachers know the value of finding those surprising science experiments and demonstrations that hook kids’ attention.  One popular one is to have kids predict whether soda cans will sink or float, which turns out to be a nice hook for ideas of density.  Kids generally figure that if one thing of a kind sinks [...]

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Hands-on class activities on the cell

January 12, 2010

Looking for some activities to jazz up your class lecture on the cell and biology?  Here are a few hands-on teaching activities for middle school or high school: Here are some cool cells to look at under a microscope: Cheek cells Onion cells Thin smears of ripe versus green banana, stained lightly with iodine.  Says [...]

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How do I teach about climate change?

January 2, 2010

It seems to be in vogue to teach about climate change.  Thank god.  I mean, is there anything else more confusing nowadays?  Teaching students just to wade through the puddles of mud being slung across party lines is a message in media digestion in itself! Luckily there are many resources being developed to help educators [...]

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Misconceptions about misconceptions

December 3, 2009

I’ve got a new podcast posted, this one with my esteemed colleague Valerie Otero of the University of Colorado at Boulder.  She tells us why she thinks that the idea of student “misconceptions” is very dangerous — and gives us a new way to think about student ideas in the classroom, and some activities to [...]

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Name that mystery SEM sample, win a prize

November 30, 2009

A while back I blogged about a cool opportunity to get anything (yes, anything!) scanned on a Scanning Electron Microscope. Posted from the ASPEX website, here is a toy bunny, macrosize, and microsize: Though how anyone could give up that cute wittle bunny is beyond me. You can still send them samples (which I just [...]

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Chemical apple pie

November 28, 2009

A tip of the apron to Elnore Grow for this one: CHEMICAL APPLE PIE  (No apples but tastes like Apple Pie) Yield 1 pie Ingredients 1 recipe pastry for a 9 inch double crust pie ( I buy this already done) 2 cups water 1 1/2 cups white sugar 1 1/2 teaspoons cream of tartar [...]

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Making light rays in the classroom

November 14, 2009

In optics experiments, you often need to create lines of light.  You can do this with light boxes, but they’re expensive, and tend to  have too many rays to be useful.  Laser light boxes are great, but again, spendy. One teacher recommends using laser levels. These are the things made to help you hang pictures [...]

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