Wednesday, January 24, 2018

No Time for Pictures: Science Study Continues

Today's lab was mostly well organized. Students had the chance to think about mixtures vs. solution, chemical vs. physical change, and density as they mixed a number of solutions.

There were lots of unexpected events throughout the exploration including the following:
  • A few students lost their chance to participate since after many reminders of how to care for materials, stay with your lab group, and take the science seriously, they simply proved that it was too dangerous to have them continue based on their fooling around. Hopefully that won't happen again.
  • Some students showed tremendous leadership and teamwork skills.
  • Others struggled with collaboration in ways I haven't noticed before.
  • There were some too who simply could not follow directions--they refused to take the time to read through the lab sheet. Once they saw others making slime however, they focused more and got through the lab.
  • Scaffolding the lab from the dull and more pointed exercises to the more exciting labs was a good idea as that kept almost all the young chemists involved in the activity.
We put the mixtures and solutions we made away, and will revisit them in a couple of weeks to see what happened during that time. We'll discuss changes, revisit conservation of mass which we didn't review today, and move on to some study of the vocabulary and concepts. Following that we'll engage in a sound lab. 

There was no time for pictures as I was straight out helping the young chemists with their study. Thankfully during one block I had an amazingly helpful teaching assistant. I also had a number of really helpful students pitch in to clean up, wash the equipment, and organize.

I think I may be learning more than the children during the initiation of this new curriculum, and learning isn't always easy, but I'm not giving up.