April+19,+2011

Reflection 7 – Tuesday April 19, 2011

Today was our last day of having the students pick out an experiment, create a problem, do research, create a hypothesis, and write down supplies. We had group three today which had nine students. So, we have four experiments for this group. We started off the same way as we did the last two days, with reviewing the Scientific Method. This group had a harder time remember what all of the steps were because we have not seen them in almost three weeks. We prompted the students and we were able to get them to remember the six sections. Then Patrick completed his crushing a can experiment. As he did the experiment, we reinforced safely and the different steps that he was going through. After the experiment, we discussed what we could do different to get different results and the temperature of the water, similar to the other two lessons, is what come about. Patrick placed the water in the freezer and we moved on the lesson. We started the lesson by handing out the packets and the lab notebooks. As like last week, we crossed out the experiments that group two had chosen so that none of the groups completed the same one. The student wrote down three or more experiments that seemed interesting to them and we then placed them into groups by interest. This group was a little more challenging to place into groups for two reasons. One, the students were in “clicks” and would write down the same experiments. One of our goals was to have each student work with someone they normally do not work with. The second obstacle with placing the students into groups was that there we little repetition of experiments that the students wanted to do. We are pretty sure that all 21 experiments that were left were on the board somewhere. It was like a puzzle and we were able to figure it out. As we wondered around, the students discussed and wrote down the problem for the experiment. On the board, we wrote out what our answer would look like for our experiment. Next the students wrote down their research. Since we did not have time to actually research the information, we again allowed the students to just write down what they knew about the topic or the supplies they might use. The hypothesis was next. Most of the student had an easy time with this. For those who needed help, we were right there to help them. The final step for today was for the students to write down the supplies that they needed for their experiment. As the students finished up with the four steps they needed to complete for today, Patrick brought back the bucket of water with ice and a thermometer in it. Just like the last two days, were completed the crushing a can experiment again with colder water. This time though, the can did not crush more with the cold water. So, we brought back the can from a different day to show that it does crush the can more. This pointed out the fact that we should always being doing an experiment more than once to make sure our results are correct.

Experiments: 1) Spinning Eggs 2) Rock and Sound 3) Ice Pen 4) Go Boat Go