Team building is an important part of running a class. And, it requires constant upkeep. If I want my car to run smoothly throughout the year, I can’t change the oil once a year and expect it to last. Similarly, I can’t just do a science team building activity at the beginning of the year…
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Unit conversions is important to learn, but to teach unit conversions is boring because most examples are irrelevant to life. Sure, we can teach students to convert kilometres to millimetres (and that might be important for certain science applications). But, when is a student really ever going to need to know how far the distance…
CER (Claim Evidence Reasoning) is a great way to teach students to draw conclusions by analyzing their data and linking it to with scientific facts/reasoning, but CER practice resources are hard to find. In Blog 4, I give some CER examples in the form of infographics. The infographics are great in helping students see samples…
Is there something we can do to start teaching STEM in a simple way? STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) is an increasingly popular way to teach science and math in a holistic, applied way by using the engineering design process. Teaching stem gives off the impression that it requires teachers to go well beyond…
Using science videos is a great way to reinforce or illustrate a concept. But, making and marking the accompanying science video activity and/or worksheet is time consuming. Yes, there are tools out there that try to make this easier. Edpuzzle, Google Forms, and many other web apps allow teachers to embed questions into the videos…
Students are always looking for a “right answer” in science, which leads students to be myopic when it comes to analyzing data. “What am I supposed to get” or “What is supposed to happen?” are common lines I hear from students as a result of the quest for a right answer. In labs, the expectation…
Giving students retests is a popular practice now, but how do teachers run better retests? And by better, I don’t just mean having students do better. I also mean making it easier and worthwhile for teachers to even give a retest. One of the biggest problems when it comes to retesting is that students…
CER is an awesome format to teach science students, but CER examples are lacking. CER stands for Claim, Evidence, and Reasoning. It is a great format for writing explanations is it serves to tie together findings, data, and scientific principles. I am beginning to use CER with my classes and I love it. Unfortunately, while…
A periodic table lesson can be boring because it focuses on facts. We should focus on the application – it’s much more exciting! So, what’s the most amazing application with regards to the periodic table? It’s that it allowed Mendeleev (who first proposed a version of the periodic table that led to development of the…
What do we tend to focus on when we teach scientific method? Part of “doing” science is to come up with models that describe invisible phenomena. Bohr, Rutherford, and Thomson developed models of the atom. Watson and Crick developed the double-helix model of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). However, when we teach scientific method, we don’t always…
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