Friday, September 29, 2006

Take 5: 9/29/06

Homecoming week at AHS...where a typical comment from the students is "why do we have school during homecoming, we don't learn anything this week anyway." It was hard to motivate the students this week, especially today with the homecoming assembly!

Since I know the students would be unmotivated and preoccupied with homecoming, I wanted to plan something so they could actively participate. On Wednesday, Brian had designed a mini-lab with different types of reactions. I used this activity in class today, which ties in all of the aspects from this chapter. Their test is Monday, so it was a good review. Each reaction was different, so as a group of 4 the students performed the experiment, determined the type of reaction, predicted the products and balanced the equation. When they were finished, I had each group explain their experiment to the rest of the class. It was a great review activity...thanks Brian!

On Monday of this week, the students were working on writing and balancing chemical equations. I posted a word document to my web page and had the students access this from their laptops, and save it to the desktop. The document had 10 word equation and they had to work for 8 min on writing the formulas and balancing them. After the 8 min was up, they paired up with someone and checked their partner's work for mistakes. If there was a mistake, they highlighed the incorrect information and inserted a comment explaining why it was incorrect. Then they paired up and fixed the mistakes together. I really liked the activity and the kids worked well together.

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