Notebooks and Binders for Student Organization

Notebooks or Binders for Student Organization Does your class start like this? ” I forgot my…..” “I can’t find my…..” *sounds of frantic paper shuffling* Are you tired of beginning every class this way?  I was, too.  Enter: The Science Notebook. What, exactly, is the Science Notebook?   A few decades ago, I started showing […]

Hexagonal Thinking and a Game

There are review games, and then there are Review Games.

Test Review Strategy – Summarization in Student Learning

Once we’ve done the usual steps – sharing content and activities and labs – and are ready to ask students to show what they know, it’s time for students to do some serious processing. Enter summarization.

Photosynthesis

Teaching photosynthesis can be daunting. How much do I teach? How can I make photosynthesis simple without dumbing it down and leaving out important structures and steps?

Learning Ions

Somewhere during the first few years of teaching chemistry, I decided to ask students to memorize the formulas for common ions. I don’t remember why I did this.

Experimetal Error and Lab Reports

During my first few years as a science teacher, I read more student lab reports than I care to count. I became most interested in the conclusions, because I quickly learned that conclusions could be most reflective of student learning.

Writing the Claim: Claim, Evidence, Reasoning

A claim is an answer to a question. Just about any question, actually.

You’ve come up with a question to investigate. You’ve gathered data, either from your own procedure and methodology, or perhaps from data compiled by others. You may have organized those data in a way that points to a pattern. Voila! Proof, right?

Nope.

Student Collaboration: Building a Classroom Culture

I took a hot minute (read: decades) to learn to foster a culture of collaboration in my classroom. I learned the most important pieces of the puzzle pretty much by coincidence.