First Day of School Plans

For my AP Biology class, the students already know each other, I just don't know them.  We don't need any sort of mixer, so we get right to work.  I want them to get practice designing an experiment and get them comfortable with using google sheets. We use google sheets for nearly all our labs, because it allows for instant sharing of everyone's data.  

Since I want to focus on learning how to set up a lab and use sheets, I present them with a simple question to investigate.  We delve into the heavy AP labs soon enough.  I got this simple idea from a lab from Cooking with Science on Teachers Pay Teachers and combined it with an exercise from Biology Inquiries: Standards-Based Labs, Assessments, and Discussion Lessons by Martin Shields. The question to investigate is, "Do you get more juice out of lemons if you heat them first?" After designing the experiment and collecting data, they work on finding the standard deviation and graph the data including 2 Standard Error of the Mean. We could also add in a chi-square analysis, but I think they have enough on their plates already.

For the Living Environment class, we use stations as a get to know your classmates, get set up for class, and practice some lab techniques. The inspiration for this activity was from Amy Brown Science and her Science Chat. My students get their textbook, set up their notebook, adjust their goggles and lab aprons, and pick their preferred size of gloves. They also practice reading the meniscus in a graduated cylinder, using a ruler, using pH paper, and calibrating our digital scales. To try to save paper, I give them an answer sheet to fill in as they go that is a half sheet (but is quite tight on space). Here is a link to the stations I use and the link to the answer sheets for the students to use and keep track of what stations they still need to go to.