Days 4-7 Physics

Clearly already falling off the writing wagon!

Day 4: I was absent, they did some CER intro. Posted this in twitter already, but LOVED this intro to CER! I found a video about changing shoes for timing of a race, defining IV, DV, and CV. It turns into a perfect CER! They did it pretty much on their own and it came out great!

Day 5: We reviewed CER – I showed them some examples of ones they wrote that needed work, and some that were good. Then I put them in groups and asked the Key Question – Is Cereal a Soup?. The CER part wasn’t super clear, but it got them in groups and talking, which is what we are trying to practice.

Then we did a paper helicopter CER which came out great – plus some off-screen manipulatives! It was good for defining variables, Claim and Evidence. They earned the 1 point for Reasoning by just ATTEMPTING any explanation about why their claim was true (turns out, lots of folks (except the example I chose!) think heavier things fall faster, and this experiment gave plenty of evidence for that misconception, doh. Need to untangle that later.). But overall I was pretty pleased with this activity!

Days 6/7: We started energy – we were all supposed to go to Computational Modeling in the summer (stupid corona!!!). Since 3/4 of the team are trained modelers, we decided to jump in a bit and start some stuff specific to that curriculum, mainly starting with energy and focusing on the choice of system and state diagrams. This is going pretty well so far. I made up some scenarios to WB and they did such a great job! This one was my favorite… the kids are really adaptable with the tech tools!

Day 3 – CERs in Physics

OK well, I had to be absent today which was annoying, however, I thought this CER activity went GREAT!  (here is the day’ classkick deck).  I always struggle to help them write their first CER and this one is so simple and clean!  I had to make it all asynchronous since I wasn’t going to be there – but it would work with class discussion too.  First I found a video very clearly defining independent, dependent, and controlled variables (which I wish I had when I introduced it the other day), about times in a race with different shoes.  Then I asked them a few basic questions about the experiment…  then showed on the next page (and through a video I made), how that is really a CER!  Each part was SO OBVIOUS, and they could write a decent reasoning about WHY the running shoes were better (we always struggle with this part).  It was so simple and clear and I loved it so much!  We will see if this pays off with paper helicopters next class!

We then had them write CER finding evidence of a physicist “like them” however they defined that.  They made flipgrids and then commented on each others’.  The CERs weren’t terrific but they researched and shared some different scientists and came up with some cool stuff!  Plus they got to interact with each other on video.  🙂

A successful day, I just wish I had been there!  But I got to watch it unfold on Classkick!