First Day of School Plans for Physical Science (Part 1)

I cannot even tell you how tickled I was last year to see that Sarah Carter of Math = Love was teaching Physical Science. I knew I'd be teaching physical science this year, and would have resources available from her blog to use. As I figured, I am starting the year with two activities she blogged about.

I love having students work in collaborative groups. I wrote my master's thesis about it! One of my grad school classes actually had Elizabeth Cohen's Designing Groupwork as a text. I plan to use "Broken Circles" from this book a week or two after school starts. But more on that later. What I'm going to use to start training students in collaborative work is the exercise "Build It." from the book Get it Together: Math Problems For Groups Grades 4-12. Sarah blogged about it here. The directions and cards are available from Stanford University. I did rework the directions slightly to work with the materials I had (Legos) and to work with the titles I had for roles that students play in their group. Here's the direction sheet each group will get:

Build It

Everyone Gives Information

Supplies: (To be picked up by the materials manager)

1. Baggie with Build It clue cards (start with Built It #1 cards, only take one set at a time, come back for the others when you are finished with your current set, and return the set you are finished with)
2. A set of square Legos (2 each of red, yellow, orange, blue, purple, green)
3. A piece of graph paper

Objective: Your group's goal is to build structures described in the clue cards, following the rules below.

Rules:

1. The Materials Manager will open one envelope and pass all the clues out to members of the group.
2. Each of you, may look at your own clue(s) and tell your group what it says, but do not show the cards to anyone else.
3. Build it!
4. When the group is done, review your clues to make sure that you really are finished. (The Monitor should give final approval.)
5. The Recorder should sketch your solution on graph paper.
6. Return the cards to the front and try the next puzzle following the rules above.
7. When time is up, return all cards in their baggies, and all Legos to the front.

Discuss the following question:

How did your group know that you had solved the puzzles?

Adapted, with permission, from Get It Together, © 1989 The Regents of the University of California. Program for Complex Instruction — Stanford University.

I printed and laminated all of the build it direction cards and bagged up the appropriate Legos (thanks to my younger two daughters who have quite the Lego obsession). Last night I asked my mom (who is visiting) and my 15 year old daughter to be guinea pigs and try this out, since in general I don't like to do activities cold in class. I am ashamed to admit this, as someone who has taught Geometry, but we decided that edges were the lateral surfaces of the Legos and the faces were the top and bottom. I can assure you that Build It #1, #3, and #4 will not work with these incorrect definitions. Fortunately, my mathematician husband came in and asked some clarifying questions about edges and faces and light-bulbs lit up.  The builds went much better after that. I decided that I will give students these definitions in diagram form at the beginning so they can get to figuring out how to work together right away.

We did find one card that didn't work in the Build It Between set of directions.  There are two cards, one that says, "The green cube is between the orange cube and the yellow cube." and another says, "The orange cube is between the green cube and the yellow cube." I think the easiest fix is to leave one of those cards out. We put the row together by leaving out, "The green cube is between..."

In our attempt to understand the directions when we were confusing what an edge was, I googled Build It to see if I could find some pictures of solutions. Instead of solutions, I found another cooperative group building exercise that I think I'll use a couple of weeks into the school year.  The document is here. In this exercise students use clue cards to build a city block. 

This tower needed a view from the bottom to see all of the blocks.