Structure Strips for Note-taking

Toward the end of the school year, I was perusing Pinterest and came across a blog post called "Where have you been all my life Structure Strips!?" This caught my eye because the structure strip on the left hand side of the page contained a main idea, some key words and key concepts. Although this was to guide student writing for history, I immediately saw an application for note-taking in my Honors Biology class.

One of the skills I want my students to develop in this class is the ability to read a text and take notes. This skill becomes more and more valuable as students move on academically. Up to this point, I was asking my students to do modified Cornell notes as they read selections from their textbook based on a main idea I gave them to put at the top of their page of notes. Afterward, I would give them a list of disciplinary core ideas (DCIs) from NGSS or enduring understandings (EUs) from NYSSLS and they had to pick which page of notes those statements would go with. As the year went on, several students began getting the hang of outlining the most important information, but many students were just making a list of bold words and writing the definitions. They needed more guidance.

For the last unit of the year, Ecology, I gave them my own structure strips to guide their note-taking. After cutting each page into the four strips and gluing each of them into four different pages of their notebooks, I told students to use the main idea, key vocabulary, and included DCIs or EUs to help them decide what from the reading should actually go in their notes. This way, they were not guessing about what was the most important information in the section they were reading in their textbook.

As we approached the end of the unit, I asked one of my students (who had been doing fairly well with the Cornell style) what she thought of the structure strips. She answered that she like them better than the Cornell notes because she felt like using the structure strips gave her more freedom in how she took her notes. Overall, I felt students notes were getting closer to the key ideas in the text that they needed to be focusing on. I forgot to take a picture of any of my students notes though, so I don't have any student examples. Oops!

Here are links to each set of structure strips for the seven units we do in Honors Biology:
(The numbers under the main idea are the chapter and sections from their textbook, Pearson's Concepts and Connections, that their notes should cover. Unit 7 may be missing those.)

Unit 1: Characteristics of Life
Unit 2: Nutrients, Energy, and Biochemical Processes
Unit 3: Homeostasis in Humans
Unit 4: Diseases and Disruption of Homeostasis
Unit 5: Comparative Reproduction
Unit 6: Genetics, Biotech, and Decision Making
Unit 7: Ecology

Population Growth Curves with Bubbles

This was another mini lab from the collection of labs from Dr. Close that I blogged about here. In this lab students were recreating the 3 different population growth curves by caring or not caring for a population of bubbles.

For the growth curve of k selected species who care for their young to maturity, students blow a bubble and do everything in their power to not let the bubble pop. This included blowing on the bubble and fanning it away from obstacles. This section certainly takes the longest because the bubbles last the longest. I started getting nervous that we wouldn't finish within out 80 minute time frame while students worked on this population, but fortunately, the other two population types go more quickly. Personally, I found this the most hysterical section of the lab, and I think students would agree. (Although none of my pictures quite captured how funny they looked chasing their bubbles around.)

In the next population, students blew a bubble, but could not help it along. This was a hard transition after protecting the first 50 bubbles so carefully.

In the final population, not only could students not help the bubbles, but for them to survive past birth, the bubble had to cross over a meter stick that was one meter in front of the bubble blower. These results mimic the r selected species, often where parents lay many eggs with no parental involvement past that.

After data was collected, students graphed their data on semi-log paper to see how well it matched to the graphs in their textbook.  I reformatted the lab into this document. For the semi log paper, I like the paper from here and choose the 2 decades paper.

This was a great lab to get students outside and moving around a lot. The lab also gave them a real experience to relate back to the graph they needed to understand.

Modeling Energy Movement Between Trophic Levels

One of my main goals when teaching is to help students understand concepts by them actually interacting with the concept in a hands-on way. I was reading through posts on one of the science teacher Facebook groups that I'm a part of and saw a post about a lab demonstrating energy loss from one trophic level to the next. The lab was part of a set of labs from the Health and Science Pipeline Initiative. Although you need to register to be able to use the curriculum on the website, it is free (my favorite kind). The Medical Biology labs are organized by NGSS Disciplinary Core Ideas for Life Science. Under LS2: Ecosystems: Interactions, Energy, and Dynamics is lab 12 Cycling of Matter and Energy Flow. We just did part "a" of the lab. All parts of the lab look great, but we were short on time. We were able to complete part a in a 40 minute period.

I printed out labels for the cups, representing 5 trophic levels: producers, primary consumers, secondary consumers, tertiary consumers, and quaternary consumers. All cups but the producers have holes in the bottom. We used sidewalk chalk in the parking lot to mark off 10ish foot sections and brought out a couple of water pitchers (representing the energy moving from one trophic level to the next). The lab calls for 500 mL of water per cup, but our cups weren't that big, so we started with 200 mL which worked fine. Next time, we may separate the energy levels by more than 10 feet, since students were getting pretty good at quickly getting from one level to the next without losing much water.

Students had a great time running the leaking cups from one energy level to the next and they had a solid understanding of energy movement and consumption from one tropic level to the next. This one is a keeper.

Modeling Logistic Growth with Skittles

As much as possible, I want my students to understand concepts by getting their hands on them, so I'm always on the lookout for new ideas of activities or labs to add to my units. Last year I saw a post  in the AP Bio teacher group in Facebook describing a series of ecology mini labs, and I saved the file to the ecology unit folder in Google drive. As I was planning our Ecology unit, I took a look at new files I had in drive and decided to give this one from Pam Close a try. You can request the whole set of mini labs from Dr. Close's website here.

Students are given a plot of "land" and a set of "organisms" with rules for placing them on the land and guidelines for whether they live or die of starvation. They simulate 8-10 generations and determine the carrying capacity of their land.

Students also added the exponential growth curve to compare it with the logistic growth the lab showed.

I think it was a great way for students to see how the logistic growth curve is formed. Students rolled dice to determine location and the organisms were skittles. The class really got into it. I must confess it was pretty noisy with 7 lab groups all rolling two dice for most of the lab, but I enjoy a lab with some noise, so I didn't mind. By the third generation most groups had a pretty good idea of what the carrying capacity of their land was. I put the information from Dr. Close's lab in this document as well as the "land" grid for the skittles organisms.

Review BINGO for a larger class

This year my AP Biology class was up to 15 students. When the class sizes were 10 or under, we could play evolution or ecology review BINGO using the floor as the BINGO card area, which I blogged about here. With 15 I have less floor space, but would need more BINGO card area to cover to keep all the kids engaged.

This year, I made individual BINGO cards for each student and put all of the questions in a Google slide presentation. Before we began, students had to fill in the squares with 2 yes, 2 no, 2 True, 2 False, 2 A, 2 B, 2 C, 2 D, 2 1, 2 2, 2 3, 2 4. I had bought a set of BINGO chips earlier in the school year for an antibiotic resistance lab for Honors Bio and had plenty of left-overs, so we were all set with chips. I also have a bag of smarties in my desk. As we went through the slides, students would call out BINGO when they had it, we'd go back through the slides and check the answers and I'd throw the winning student a roll of smarties and continue on with the game. Students enjoyed it and stayed engaged throughout.

Here are the links to the files:

Evolution review questions

Ecology review questions

AP Bio BINGO cards

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.