Lesson Plans

This lab is great for analysis of motion graphs (d vs. t, v vs. t, a vs. t) and how to change them one into another in a detailed manner. At the end, the students should find the acceleration due to gravity from the slope of the best fit line of the graph of v vs. t.

Attached is the specifications for this lab.

Keeping with the theme of building, my last workshop for the younger elementary students was about building structures of different materials. I first read the kids the classic tale of the Three Little Pigs. After that we discussed the different materials that were used to build the three houses. I asked for the kids to hypothesise wether the story is correct.

Hydraulics and Pneumatics are great topics to teach children. First of all both words sound very impressive and when the children learn these words they will sound very important and knowledgeble if they use them. Also, hydraulics and pneumatics are used in many machines and in many everyday applications, therefore it is easy to show the importance of understanding these topics. One can easily show and explain the difference between hydraulics and pneumatics - a great "Compare and Contrast" analysis. Thirdly, there are many fun and impressive experiments that can be done with hydraulics and pneumatics in a very inexpensive way, with very accessible materials. And finally, since hydraulics and pneumatics is so useful, there can be multiple projects that children can actually build themselves. Thus weaker students and stronger science students can both do projects, yet with differing complexity.

This 10 - 15 minute quiz has a question on drawing a triangle given its angles and the length of one of its sides, a couple algebra questions (as a review) and creating a perpendicular bisector.

In order to explain photosynthesis to my 6-9 year olds at my weekly workshop, I first thought of the picture idea - making each reactant and product of photosynthesis a picture. For instance the leaf is a food factory, then there's water (raindrop), light (sun) and carbon dioxide (which comes from people breathing or car exhausts) - easy pictures to draw, and the products being glucose (a form of sugar - therefore picture is sugar cube) and oxygen (again humans need this to breath).

This project was introduced after teaching the class about simple machines. It was a great and fun way to summarize the whole unit: to build a Rube Goldberg Machine.

Have fun.

For the optics unit project, I decided to have the students create a picture book with Optics as the title. Each student is doing a page spread on a different sub-topic and then we'll combine all the pages and print them as a whole book. All the page-spreads need to be done on computer with the same layout, then handed in to me as a .pdf. At the end, the students will get a book of all these topics, one of the pages being theirs., the rest will come from their peers.

For the past month, I was teaching my students (in my grade 8 science class) about the cell, it's organelles, the functions, etc. As a finally to the unit, we are doing a project: Cells on a Ceiling. I got the idea from the Cells on Ceiling by Kathryn S. Hopkins. Basically, the class is divided up into groups, each group assigned a particular organelle of the cell. Here is the basic procedure, and the detailed project outline is attached: