April+7,+2011

Reflection 6 – Thursday April 7, 2011

Today was very similar to Tuesday except that group two has ten students and Mr. Lewis and his class was not present. So, that means we completed the crushing a can experiment on our own and we ended up with five experiments instead of four. So, to start the day, we reviewed the Scientific Method. This group seems to have a very good memory and we quickly went over all six sections. Next we moved into the crushing a can experiment. This was interesting because neither of us had done the experiment before and we were both very nervous about completing it in front of the students. As we were doing it, we made sure to point out the safety measure we were taking and the different steps of the method that we had gone through. We asked for the students help in creating a hypothesis so that they felt as though they were part of the experiment. The experiment went well and then we discussed what could make a difference in how much the can crushed. This took quite a bit of prompting to get the students to get a temperature change but eventually they got it and we told them we would revising it at the end of the lesson with colder water. The first step of the actually lesson was to hand out the experiment packets and the lab notebooks. We had the students pick out four or so experiments that seemed interesting and we wrote their names and the numbers on the board. Then we groups the students my interest. We tried to stay away from grouping the people that we sitting next to each other together. This worked out really well because there were five girls and five boys so we paired them that way with their interested. Then the groups moved next to each other and began writing a problem, research, a hypothesis, and their supplies. We walked around helping out where we were needed and pointed them in the right direction. As the students were writing their information in their lab notebooks for each step, we would write on the board what it should look like and the format that we wanted it in. This was extremely helpful for the students because if they had a question, we could say “If you look at the board, what do you think it needs to look like?” This prompted the students and we were not forced to give them the answers. Once our time was running low, we gathered the supplies for the crushing a can experiment and completed it again with colder water. This can ended up extremely crushed and the students were very intrigued. They found it amazing that the can could crush as much as it did. We hope that next time the crushing a can experiment works as well as it did this time. This lesson went very well and we cannot wait to do it again.

Experiments: 1) Lava Lamp Creation 2) Balloon Rockets 3) Growing Crystals 4) Salty Eggs 5) Floating Playdough