This week students produced and shared their CER posters with their classmates. It was a really great couple of days of presentations and I was really proud of the students who showed up and presented. The way that we do presentations in this class is a little different, but I'm confident that it is far superior to the "old school" way that presentations are usually done in classes. The majority of students prefer my method and have a lot less anxiety about presenting. On Thursday, my classes had their first astronomy lesson on historical astronomers, and we will continue with astronomy next week.
We're finally done with our review of basic science principles. At the beginning of the week, we reviewed the parts of the scientific method and made sure we had an understanding of what the independent variable, dependent variable, and control was when it comes to science experiments. We took our first big post test this week and then started our first CER poster. The CER poster is going to be worth a large chunk of the students' quarter grade, and it's important they show up for presentation day on Tuesday and Wednesday. We also have parent teacher conferences next week on the same days.
This week's lessons included a starter comparing social status vs. aggression and accompanying questions. After answering these starter questions we turned in the answers to our first four starter exercises for a grade. We viewed a powerpoint on the difference between observation and inference and practiced recognizing the difference in a document. The other lesson from this week was on the metric system and how to convert one metric unit to another. We then practiced that skill and I hope students had a good handle on how to do it by the time the class period was up. We should be ready to take our first post test next week.
This week I introduced CERs to students. CER stands for Claim, Evidence, Reasoning. CER is a framework for students to write high quality claims backed by sufficient and relevant evidence. It requires students to be justified in whatever attitudes and opinions they want to share with their classmates. We will be making CER posters and sharing them with classmates at least six times this school year. We also did a "number sequence" starter that had to do with the scientific method and how the average person thinks about the universe vs. how a scientist looks at the universe with regards to inquiry and experimentation. We also viewed a powerpoint about the nature of scientific evidence and the difference between science and pseudoscience. The content of this powerpoint presentation will make up some of their first test.
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AuthorMr. Saurer is a science teacher and basketball coach currently teaching at Granger High School. Archives
February 2019
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