Biology by the Math Mom

Thursday, July 19, 2018

Links to Guided Reading Questions for Biology in Focus 2nd Edition in One Document

So, I finally got to putting all of the links to the guided reading questions for Biology in Focus 2nd Edition into one document! I put this on my website for my students to have easy access to all of the guides at once--even though they have chapter by chapter access on Google Classroom.

This summer, I've been busily writing the answer keys for the guides and revising each of the guides as I go. Mainly it's been changing question numbers. I've also rearranged a few questions to go with the flow of the book, and deleted a couple that ended up in the wrong chapter. I try to keep the questions to a minimum and just focus on the most important concepts for the course, so they are not too overwhelming for my students to tackle.

One thing I also did in this document is put five of the chapters in red. I am working on getting dual credit for my students in this class and needed to add 5 chapters that I don't typically cover in AP Bio. The red chapters don't need to be done to get to all of the essential knowledge statements, just need to be done for the dual credit I'm looking for.

Here it is!

Guided Reading and Videos (BIF 2nd Edition)

Saturday, June 23, 2018

Biology in Focus 2nd Edition Reading Guides and Videos

Next year, we are switching from Campbell's Biology 8th Edition to Biology in Focus 2nd Edition (BIF). The guided reading questions that I've been using (and blogged about here) were an edited version of the Holtzclaws' reading guides for Campbell's 8th edition. I used the Holtzclaws' AP Biology Review book to help me to know what questions to eliminate to shorten the reading guides so that they were only asking questions that were key to helping students understand content important for the AP Biology curriculum.

For many of the chapters, I just needed to change chapter and section numbers to adjust the guide for BIF. Other chapters combined the content of 2 Campbell chapters, so that took a little more work. Occasionally one section was moved from one chapter to another. I've been feverishly working on updating these for the entire book since I wanted to print hard copies for each chapter before I checked out of my classroom for the summer, so I can work on making keys for each of them while I'm home on summer "break." I'll include links to each of them here. I do imagine that I'll need to do some revision as I go through each of the guides this summer and fortunately they will show up automatically in the links.

Unit 8: Plants

Plant Form and Function

Chapters 28-31 Questions

Plant Control (Bozeman)

Unit 9: Ecology

Motor Mechanisms and Animal Behavior

Chapter 39 Questions

Tinbergen's Experiment

Population Ecology and the Distribution of Organisms

Chapter 40 Questions

Population Ecology: The Texas Mosquito Mystery (Crash Course)

Human Population Growth (Crash Course)

Species Interactions

Chapter 41 Questions

Community Ecology: Feel the Love (Crash Course)

Ecological Succession: Change is Good (Crash Course)

Ecosystems and Energy

Chapter 42 Questions

Ecosystem Ecology (Crash Course)

The Water and Carbon Cycle (Crash Course)

The Nitrogen and Phosphorus Cycles (Crash Course)

Global Ecology and Conservation Biology

Chapter 43 Questions

5 Human Impacts on the Environment (Crash Course)

Conservation and Restoration Ecology (Crash Course)

Unit 10: Human Form and Function

The Internal Environment of Animals: Organization and Regulation

Chapter 32 Questions

Positive and Negative Feedback Loops (Bozeman)

Great Glands: Your Endocrine System (Crash Course)

The Immune System

Chapter 35 Questions

Your Immune System: Natural Born Killer (Crash Course)

Reproduction and Development

Chapter 36 Questions

The Reproductive System (Bozeman)

Neurons, Synapses, and Signaling

Chapter 37 Question

Nervous and Sensory Systems

Chapter 38 Questions

The Nervous System (Crash Course)

Friday, May 25, 2018

Design Challenges in Physical Science

Teaching Physical Science in a classroom setting was new for me this year. (And the reason for so few blog posts this year.) Since I was building this course from scratch, I decided to try to design it according to the NGSS. New York put out a draft of their modified NGSS that guided me through class planning. Science and Engineering Practices is one of the key components of the NGSS and by the second half of the year, I finally started using some labs that were open-ended design challenges.

I don't teach this class at the same school I teach AP Biology. This class is at a non-traditional Consortium, where I only see my students once a week for 90 minutes (and then they do the rest of the learning at home) and there is an age range of students from 6th-8th grade. This is the first year that I've taught a class with 6th graders. The two years before, I taught Advanced Life Science at this Consortium for 7th-9th graders. I figured that 6th-8th wouldn't be much different, but it was a completely different dynamic! This class did not work as independently as I was used to classes doing. But, when I gave them design challenges, they took them on with enthusiasm and hardly needed redirection. They did four challenges in the second semester. For most, they had a full 80 minutes to work on the design.

When we neared the end of our unit on forces and interactions, student groups completed the egg drop challenge, that I blogged about here. They each received a bag of the same items and had to choose a design for their egg holder. They were allowed to trade with other groups if both groups agreed to it and they had a scoring scale to also help them as they decided what and how much of it to use. They wanted the lowest score possible which was determined by mass of apparatus, number of seconds it took to load the apparatus, the number of items in the apparatus. In the end, three out of seven of the groups dropped their eggs without breaking them.

When we started the unit on energy, students built a Rube Goldberg machine to complete a chosen task, utilizing the maximum number of simple machines. In this challenge students tried to maximize their points. I brought in a collection of dominoes (including a standard set and two wooden sets of large dominoes), two sets of Legos from the Crazy Action Contraptions book plus several more pieces from my kids' Legos, yarn, marbles, cardboard boxes, toilet paper and paper towel tubes, and a roll of masking tape.

The next week, we moved onto building marble roller coasters (that I blogged about here) with lengths of pipe insulation cut in half. They had some parameters to follow--number of loops, turns, and hills. We also used their finished roller coasters to practice finding the average speed of the marble in the coaster.

We finished off the unit with a heat challenge. Students were given their choice of several items and tasked with designing an insulating box for a paper cup that would hold the heat of water as well as or better than a Styrofoam cup. I originally saw this idea in the Carolina Biological catalog. In fact they have several kits to use as design challenges in physical science--they're a great resource. I did some googling and used several sources to put together this challenge. (I would have been tempted to just buy the Carolina kit, but it was for a much larger class than I had.)

I'll include links to each of the challenge directions that I gave each group, the lab sheets that I gave them to complete an glue into their notebooks, and the scoring sheets I gave out for the ones that they were competing for the highest or lowest score to win some sort of prize.

Forces and Motion Unit:

Egg Drop Challenge Group Directions

Egg Drop Challenge Lab Sheet

Egg Drop Challenge Score Sheets

Energy Unit:

Rube Goldberg Machine Group Directions

Rube Goldberg Machine Lab Sheet

Rube Goldberg Machine Score Sheets

Marble Roller Coaster Group Directions

Marble Roller Coaster Lab Sheet

Keep The Heat Group Directions

Keep The Heat Lab Sheet

Keep The Heat Score Sheets

Wednesday, March 21, 2018

Energy and Roller Coasters

I was so excited when I saw Sarah blog in MathEqualsLove about Marble Roller Coasters in her Physical Science class. I knew when we got to potential and kinetic energy we had to do this. Just yesterday we did this in class. The exclamations of the students helped me to know that this lab was a big hit.

The class was split into groups of two and each group was given 2 insulation tubes that were cut in half, so they had a total of 7.2 meters of roller coaster track. Each group was also given 1 marble, a roll of masking tape, and three pieces of duct tape (to tape the ends of the track together).

Before the lab, I did some searching online for idea of parameters to give to the students and what to ask them to do in their notebooks. Here is one document I found, but most of my ideas came from this lab.

Most of the pairs worked on this for a solid 60 minutes and a few groups would have been happy to have a little more time.

Here is the direction sheet that I provided for each group. And this is the lab sheet that they were given to put into their notebooks.

Saturday, March 10, 2018

Essential Knowledge Student Reflections

Going with my theme this year of reflection and revision, I have had my students regularly reflect on the Essential Knowledge statements from the AP Biology framework. Last year, I organized the Essential Knowledge statements (along with the Enduring Understandings and Learning Objectives) by each unit and provided them to my students as study guides. I blogged about it last year here.

By the end of the year, I could tell that students weren't utilizing them as much as I had hoped. I want students to grapple with these statements, get familiar with the wording, and be able to connect what we are doing in class to these statements. First change: I made time in class for this reflecting to be done.

I also wanted students to have all of these reflections in one place to review them when they study for a test and to be able to look back as the year progresses to see their own growth from beginning to end. My goal was to automate as much of this process as possible. I already use a Google Form and Autocrat to grade labs and give students rich feedback in an easy-to-read document. I love the automation of this and blogged about it last school year here.

But the issue with reflections is that I want my students to have several reflections per unit. Each time they make a reflection with the Google Form, they create another row. So, I needed to be able to merge all of the separate rows of reflections from one student into one row. Enter an additional sheet Add-On called "Power Tools"! This add-on performs several functions, but the one I was interested in combines rows. I tell it what cell to look for identical entries (last name), and it merges all of the rows by one student into one row. This usually takes me two tries, because inevitably a couple of students will type an extra space after their names sometimes, but not all of the times. Power tools recognizes this space and doesn't consider the name identical.

I made a video of me making these documents for my students after they had done their reflections in Forms--just in case it makes more sense than the directions.

Create response spreadsheet from the Google Form.
In the newly formed spreadsheet, go to add-ons and get the add-on "Power Tools"
Once it's added, go to the add-on menu, Power Tools, and click start.

Select "Data" and then "Combine Rows."
I then let it auto-select the data (which is all of it).
Choose "last name" for the key column with duplicate records.
For choosing columns to merge, I choose all of the columns, the action is "merge values," and the delimiter is "comma."
Click "finish" and it merges the rows.
Then sort the sheet alphabetically by last name, which makes it easier for me to figure out who added that extra space after their last name.
I remove the extra space and go through the combine rows process for a final time. (Which takes about 20 seconds.)
Close power tools and launch the add-on "AutoCrat" so I can make a document for each student of their responses.
Give the job a name and click next.
Select a template (I make these ahead of time and will give links to them.) It'll show what rows will be merged into which part of the google doc. Since I've put these together I know that everything will match up the way it needs to. This did take some tweaking at first for me.
Chose how the documents will be named. I do <<First>> <<Last>> Unit # Reflections
It'll suggest a folder to put the merged documents into. You may select a different one if you'd like.
I skip the optional items and don't share the results by email, although if I had a lot of students I might.
Save and then when the Job pops up, hit the triangle play button.
Once all of the documents are merged, I go to the folder they were put in and print them out for my students to reference as they prepare for their upcoming unit test.

This sounds time consuming, and it did take me awhile to figure it all out. But now that I've done it several times, I can have it completed in about 10 minutes or less.

Here are the Google Forms and Templates for each unit.

Unit 1 Biochemistry Biochemistry Template
Unit 2 Cells Cells Template
Unit 3 Cellular Energetics Cellular Energetics Template
Unit 4 & 5 The Cell Cycle The Cell Cycle Template
Unit 6 Molecular Genetics Molecular Genetics Template
Unit 7 Evolution Evolution Template
Unit 8 Plants (this unit is so small, I skipped the reflections)
Unit 9 Ecology Ecology Template
Unit 10 Humans Human Form and Function Template

Saturday, February 24, 2018

Creative Series and Parallel Circuits

Last year, knowing that I would be teaching Physical Science this year, I started collecting ideas on Pinterest for labs. One of the pins was for making circuits with aluminum foil and Christmas lights from Nitty Gritty Science. I loved the idea and had a couple of strings of old lights that weren't working reliably. I actually started to cut the lights up at the end of last year to be prepared.

I made a basic model of a series and parallel circuit to show my students and then told them to be creative. The kids certainly didn't disappoint! Most loved the process and asked if they could bring the supplies to finish up at home. They worked in class for 80 minutes, and several students had only finished the series circuit, but were still in process for the parallel circuit by the time class was over.

We began by drawing a schematic of their design. Once the design was approved, they got their supplies of a manila folder, 2 brads, a sheet of foil, scissors, several Christmas lights, a 9 volt battery, and tape. They needed reminders that tape is an insulator and to make sure the foil is always touching foil for the entire circuit.

Several parents actually commented about the popularity of this lab to me when they saw me later.

I put together directions for each table of students and also a lab sheet for them to glue into their notebooks.

Thursday, February 15, 2018

Egg Drop Challenge

As we were wrapping up our unit on forces and interactions in Physical Science, I wanted the kids to have the opportunity to apply their knowledge and also have some practice with the engineering process. For our last class before the unit test, we had an egg drop challenge.

I did some research on line, but many of the challenges out there are for students to build an apparatus at home and bring it in for the competition. Since I only see my students for one 90 minute session a week, they are busy during the week with reading the chapter and doing other assignments. I wanted students to have the opportunity to test designs and make improvements as well as practice working as a team. So, I pilfered ideas mainly from this document and put together what would be my student's in class building challenge.

Students had about 70 minutes to design and build their egg holder. Some were a little slow to start, but by the end they were all fully engaged. If I were to do this again, I'd try to figure out some way to limit the amount of glue from the glue gun used per team. I had about 7 sticks (for a full sized glue gun) and it was all used before some teams had a chance to use it even once. It was primarily one team that went hog wild with it.

In the end, of the seven teams, three of them successfully dropped their egg and had no damage to the egg. The other four were valiant attempts, all of which were exciting to watch.

Here are the directions that I gave students. It also includes the list of materials that I provided each team. All of it fit in a gallon ziplock bag. Three of the teams asked if they could use the gallon bag, and I did allow them too--even though it wasn't on their list. For students' notebooks, I gave them this reflection sheet. I also made these score sheets. These scores did not effect their lab grade, but was used to decide some fun prizes. In the end, we did not measure the distance from the target since we had to drop them on the stairs and the egg holders were flying everywhere off the steps.

Thursday, July 19, 2018

Saturday, June 23, 2018

Biochemistry: Unit 1

Cells: Unit 2

Metabolism: Unit 3

Cell Cycle and Mendelian Genetics: Unit 4 & 5

Molecular Genetics: Unit 6

Evolution: Unit 7