Two week break and first week back

So Duke and I had our two week break from school. We met for our fifth week of the summer session during these two weeks. First, we decided to make a plan for our next set of activities. Having participated in this program last year, we both decided that it would be really beneficial if I were to create an entire unit instead of just teaching another individual lesson. While a single lesson is a really great thing to design, it's a big step forward to design an entire curriculum piece. So my time commitment will definitely be shifted around to be really heavy in the spring. There will be a lot of planning for next spring to do! So I'll be really busy this fall as well. Another reason for doing this is to shift work away from the end of the school year a bit because I'll be finishing up my thesis. This will be less stressful and will still really help me learn a lot and be productive in my learning and the student learning.

To start another activity, we thought about where my research would fit in through the rest of the year. We went over the schedule for the rest of the year. We decided gas laws and acids/bases were the best places for me to fit something in. Perhaps as a review for one and an intro to another. I'll be teaching the entire gas law section, so this would be a really good opportunity to build an activity into a larger lesson plan. We went down to Eastlake and blew up a bunch of balloons to see if we could make a lab which reacted limestone and acid to create CO2 and have the students figure out how much CO2 should have been produced. They will then compare their actual and theoretical values. We're still trying to find a way to bring in more of what I do to this part. I talked with Kristina and Andro this week and they suggested making it a PBL. Which I really like the idea of. Perhaps introducing it as an acid rain restoration problem.

Once we were headed in the right direction on activity #2, we decided to refocus on activity #1 and make sure that was in a position to be shown to other people. Right now I think we're coming along really nicely. Last year's activity was really hard for me to share with other science teachers. This year's activity is a lot easier for other people to do. So we made a video and edited it together to make a little piece that would introduce some of the ideas for teachers and students. Mark just showed me a program called Screenflow, and it looks like a great solution to problems that we were encountering with syncing a talk with a video. I'm anxious to start working with that and make the first project write-up something really easy to work with and very straightforward for people to download and present without an incredible amount of background knowledge.

This week in the classroom I filled out the observation form for watching our teachers and Duke and I worked out a schedule for the rest of the year for key days for me to be here. I may spend a little more time working on the computer to try and put together the last activity over the next two weeks. Then we'll get into the jelly bean lab and I'll be back in there to talk about equation balancing with carbon dioxide.

Also, it was my birthday today, and my students sang happy birthday to me and were generally really sweet! They also got me a birthday card.