Newton’s Laws of Motion

We had a lot of fun demonstrating the "every action has an equal and opposite reaction" in Physical Science. We did a lab called "Quite a Reaction" that involves cutting a thread that is holding a rubber band with a marble in its bend. It's all held together on a piece of cardboard with thumbtacks and the cardboard is sitting on 6 straws to allow movement of the cardboard. This document has the directions for the students and this one is the lab sheet they glued into their notebook.

The action and reaction happen so quickly that it's hard to see well, so we took some slow motion video of the experiment. Recording it this way made it so much easier to see.

The other activity we did with Newton's Laws of Motion was a Breakout EDU. This was the first Breakout that I did with this class. I had bought two Breakout boxes and this gave me access to the breakouts on their website, breakoutedu.com. There are also free breakouts available, even if you don't have a subscription.

There is a breakout on Newton's Laws of Motion that involves motion graphs that students have to interpret, a card sort of motion events that students have to classify as 1st, 2nd, or 3rd law, and some momentum problems to solve. As students complete the tasks, they discover combinations to multiple locks on one small and one large box. The kids loved it. Both groups were able to breakout before the end of the class. The boxes had candy and some prize cards that students work on earning throughout the year. 

Immune System Trading Cards

In reading through ideas from different FaceBook communities I am a member of, I saw someone mention making trading cards of the cellular organelles. By the time I read it, my honors biology class was already past the cell unit, but I tucked it away as a potential idea for next year.  Then I was putting together our Disease and Disruption of Homeostasis unit and realized that there was a hefty amount of new vocabulary for this unit, especially centered around the immune system.

I chose 9 key terms from the immune system and made this blank document for the students to work with.  The first page was formatted to be the cards students would actually make. The second page is where they initially typed their definitions. I then copy and pasted those descriptions into the cards on the first page and formatted them to look consistent. The document on Classroom with permission to edit and told the class to only type in the second page. Students also got a reminder that I could look at the document history to see if they were typing where they shouldn't be.

Students were divided into groups and I assigned 2 terms per group (except for 1). They finished the descriptions in the first class and also worked on sketches for their term, I put all of their information into the cards and printed the cards on card stock. The second class was spent drawing pictures of each of the terms. Each group drew all of the pictures for the term they defined.

I went ahead and laminated the finished cards. They were cut out and I used my industrial strength hole puncher to get a hole into them so we could use a book ring to hold them in sets. And there is plenty of room left on the rings for any other trading cards we make this year.