Monday, January 5: Welcome Back! Fill-in-the-Blanks and Experiment Proposal

Back in the saddle! This morning students were greeted with a group challenge called 'Kaizan!', a Japanese word that translates to "constant improvement". The students worked together to create a human machine capable of figuing out the missing card taken from a deck of 52. After several rounds, bettering their time each round, every group had completed the challenge in under a minute, some in only 30 seconds! We got a start on the homework, which asks students to fill in the blanks to complete puzzles involving operations with fractions.

Last Friday, students in both subjects took a 10 question survey about student engagement, and the results confirmed something I had been worried about. Many students said a version of the same thing: "We are surrounded by lab stations and equipment, but we don't do any experiments!" Touche. Well, we're going to fix that, and we got started today. For the next few weeks, we will leave behind the content targets associated with our Ecosystems unit and try out a unit created specifically to teach the skills, language, and habits of mind that are important to scientific inquiry. The unit is called Inquiry In Action, and can be found as a (huge) PDF online. We started today observing an M&M dissolving in water, generated a list of questions, and students began designing their own experiment for tomorrow, complete with a control group and an experimental group. For Period 2 students, their homework is to finish their experiment proposal. Period 5 was disrupted by an evacuation to Skillins, so they have no homework. Can't wait for tomorrow's experiments!