Welcome to my reflections on teaching the Motion, Force and Energy unit. I asked Karen if I could teach one period a day to get an understanding of what this unit looks like (and feels like) to teach in a real 8th grade classroom.
We got the carts and tracks to work using the appropriate motion by with 500 g on the plunger cart and pushing the plunger in to the "2". For the fan cart, we put in three batteries and replaced the 4th with the aluminum cylinder.
Today we started with Lesson 1. I probably spent a little too much time showing kids the carts on the tracks. I thought they were going to get more excited about it - maybe it's just first period, maybe it's May, or maybe it's just that they weren't the ones handling the materials.
Students were able to describe that the plunger cart was traveling at constant speed and the fan cart was speeding up when I asked them to describe the motion in the large group; but later on in their smaller group discussions and on the representations on the whiteboards, they referred to the plunger cart as speeding up and slowing down.
Students were looking at the launch as speeding up and the "catcher" as slowing it down; so we had to redirect them to look after the launch and before the slowdown.
In order to get each student to respond when they thought the carts were traveling at the same speed, I asked them to raise their hands when they thought the carts were traveling the same speed. About half the class (maybe more) thought that the carts were traveling the same speed when they were at the same position on the track and another group thought the carts were traveling the same speed at a time when the fan cart was behind the plunger cart.
Students spent about 15 minutes writing their groups' ideas on the whiteboard, I hurried them along from their own representations (most had 2 or 3 representations before sharing) because I spent too much time on the introduction. I was glad to have several sets of whiteboards so they could return to them tomorrow.
I saw lots of graphs, tables, and a variety of pictures that represented the motions. One weakness I saw and will address tomorrow is how students use their representations to support the idea that there is a certain time or position where the two carts are traveling the same speed.
1 comment:
My students were super engaged in Lesson 1 - I even heard kids after class telling the new ones coming in what a cool class they were in for.
I noticed in their graphs that the most common graph was a line with constant slope and a line increasing exponentially, with no labels. When I asked them to label it (or any graphs) they always put Speed/Time. Should we let them have unlabeled graphs (so that they don't put down more incorrect ideas)? I just said they needed to tell me some way - title, axes - what this was showing. Having red/blue colored pencils available is helpful to label graphs etc.
And a tiny caveat - I got my hair stuck in the fan cart in one class. Remind students with long hair to have it pulled back!
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