Monday, February 27, 2012

Forcing It

We're in the swing of Force & Motion. I have to admit, I am extremely excited to be discussing forces, energy, motion, and machines. Maybe it is the nerdy science teacher in me! 

I've mentioned before that I want to find a way for students to enjoy their text book.  Next year, I may have to think of a different name for our text to make it sound exciting. Well, today we had to buckle down and take notes. Try not to boo me! Luckily, after stumbling upon blogs and Dinah Zike's resources, foldables have become a constant in my classroom. 

Our big question of the day was, "What are forces?" Instead of having the students take notes and read the text. We did things a little differently. We read the text together and as we encountered a new type of force (i.e. gravity, magnetism, work, power) we defined it underneath its flap. Of course the foldable wouldn't be complete without a little sketch and demonstration. Let's just say, I was throwing things and running around my classroom all day long. 






Thanks to my new SmartBoard bulb, I was able to put the notes on the board and guide the students through each flappity-flap. For being a day full of notes and reading, it was a pretty fun time! I hope the kiddos enjoyed it as much as I did.


Have you taught force and motion? What exciting experiments and demonstrations have you done?


I know have the greatest job on earth, but I think tomorrow I will be applying this philosophy. I'll be the one in a Spiderman costume.

2 comments:

  1. Oh my gosh! I totally forgot to respond to your question about force and motion... It looks like you did just fine, though! I remember doing a lot of demonstrations and journal entries... similar to the ones you posted. I hope your unit turned out great- I'm sure it did! -Ashley

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  2. I am beginning my unit on force, speed, and motion this week. In the past, we I have always used foldables to allow the students to get the vocabulary and Newton's laws of motion down in their notes. Then I allow them to rotate through stations in the classroom which involve one or more of these concepts. The students are asked to record data and answer some sort of question or form a conclusion based on their results and explain why they got those results based on the concepts we discussed in class.
    Megan

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