Fillable Lab Sheets for AP Environmental Science Labs

Another one of my new classes for this year is AP Environmental Science.  Since we are a one to one device school, my goal is for students to complete as many lab analyses by Google Docs as possible. This saves lots of photocopies. A surprising bonus is that I am finding the labs faster to grade this way. Labs that are turned in through Google Classroom as google docs can be commented on. I can quickly type in a few comments to students' lab and count comments to determine the grade. 

One other I like about making fillable labs in Google docs is using 1-cell tables for the answers. Otherwise I find myself searching for answers that blend in with questions.

The labs themselves with teacher editions and student editions with procedures can be found in AP Classroom for Environmental Science if you are an approved teacher. 

I'll add links to the three labs that I've made fillable answer sheets for. If I could find a fillable lab sheet that someone else had done, I used them and didn't reinvent the wheel.

AP Lab #1: Primary Productivity

AP Lab #2: Species Diversity

AP Lab #7: Physical and Chemical Properties of Soil

Finishing Up Unit 1 of Pre-AP Algebra 2

One afternoon toward the end of summer, I got a phone call while at the orthodontist with my youngest daughter. I was a little surprised to see the call was from the head of the math department at my school.  The call was to ask me if I would consider taking on one of the Pre-AP Algebra 2 classes. I was actually delighted to take on another math class, although it meant an overload in an already busy year for me. My class load already included AP Environmental Science, which is brand new for me, and AP Precalculus which is a brand new curriculum. The only prepped and familiar class for this year is AP Biology. 

One of the benefits of Pre-AP Algebra 2 is that the curriculum is primarily put together, although I'm finding that it still takes some time to prep the lessons. Fortunately, unit 1 had lessons for each of the topics except for the last one. Key concept 1.3: Graphing Absolute Value as Piecewise Defined Functions didn't have a lesson. Before the year started I decided to teach the concept through a Desmos activity. I'm still about a week away from using this lesson, but wanted to share it in case it may be helpful to someone else. Feel free to let me know if you catch any errors. I'll also make adjustments as my students try it and help me find any issues.

Here's the link to Absolute Value as a Piecewise Function.

Hexagonal Thinking in AP Biology

I happened to be scrolling through Facebook a couple of weeks ago and saw a post about reviewing for an AP Biology unit test with hexagonal thinking. I was immediately intrigued. I used to give students some time in class to start working on their progress checks in AP Classroom before the test, but I had several students who were not engaged and others who preferred a quieter environment to complete these questions. Although I love a good Kahoot!, I don't always find them incredibly helpful for reviewing for an AP unit test. 

The hexagonal thinking exercise engages students and makes them think about the concepts we were studying and how all of these concepts were related. I decided that this is what we needed to strengthen our review sessions. I went to Amazon to start looking for potential hexagons to use. In the end, I settled on these cards because there were a lot of them, they were a comfortable size for writing on and fitting several on a table, and they were fairly inexpensive. Because they are just matte card stock, I laminated them. It was a little time consuming to laminate and cut out, but now I have a set of 120 cards that can be used over and over. 

I listened to this Cult of Pedagogy podcast about hexagonal thinking to get a feel for how it might work in my classroom. The podcast talked about students not just building connections with their hexagons, but also to choose several key connecting points to describe why there was a connection there. There are several digital versions that are free to use to do the hexagonal thinking exercise virtually, but since we're in class, I enjoy my students being able to get their hands on. 

When we were ready to do this in class, I made a list of key words and phrases for the unit as well as sets of 5 connection arrows and a shared document for students to share their connections and a picture of their hexagonal web. 

So far we have made hexagonal webs for our Ecology unit and our Metabolism unit. Here is the copy of the document that I made for unit 8 and also the document students used for unit 3. 

Trig Graph Match-ups

When we were working through our first trigonometry unit in Precalculus, I wanted students to be able to make the connection between the equation of the trig function and the graph. Before I'd ask students to graph the trig equations themselves, I wanted students to practice finding amplitude, frequency, period, midline, and phase shifts and be able to look for those in a graph. I found a card set of trig functions and their matching graphs on TES here...

Trig graph match ups.  https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/transformations-of-trigonometric-graphs-match-up-6407000

There are three sets of functions and graphs, so I copied each set on a different color of paper. I had teams of students work with one color and when their matches were made correctly, they moved onto another color. 

As I would check student matches, I'd ask questions such as: How did you decide that this graph matched with this equation? What part of the equation gives you a clue to how tall your graph will be? What's the difference between the frequency and period and how can you explain the difference using this graph and equation?

I know these concepts are all learned in Algebra 2, but students sure do need the refresher when they get to Precalculus.

AP Bio Instructional Adjustments after attending the 2022 AP Read

 

The view from Loews Hotel in Kansas City, MO.

This year, I went to the in person Read for the first time.  Readers always say that doing the Read will make you a better AP teacher. I want to make sure to reflect on my learning now while it is fresh in my mind to get the most out of the experience. 

I read last year, but it was virtual. After last year's Read, my big take away was to tell students to write more. Not off topic and don't contradict yourself, but make sure to answer the whole question in detail. So often I'd be reading an FRQ and although the student was going in the right direction, they were missing a little piece of critical information and didn't earn the point. There were other students who wrote an answer, and then added a little more detail in another sentence, and often times, the information required for the point was in that second sentence. 

Being in person left me with so much more to reflect on, or at least being trained on and reading the two FRQs that I did gave me plenty to consider. Here are a few:

1. If the FRQ has a data table that includes SEM, make sure to talk about statistical significance in your answer (and don't leave out the word statistical). It's also fine to talk about overlapping error bars. 

2. Remember, even if the means look different, if error bars overlap, the means are the SAME.

3. Be more specific in your answers. Keeping it general will not earn you any points. And keep track of what the question is actually asking. (I know this is a challenge when students feel time pressured.)

4. If asked to describe how some process will happen, make sure to describe the process from beginning to the very end. Don't stop half way through the process. To me, this is one of the biggest takeaways. 

5. I'm planning to find more data sets that are graphed best with scatter plots. I'll do some scouring of Data Points in HHMI Biointeractive such as Patterns of Predation. In fact, I may encourage students that when in doubt, graph a scatter plot and add a line of best fit if they feel they must.

6. Spend less time on how the processes happen correctly and more time asking students what will happen if something goes wrong along the way.

7. The independent and dependent variables should never be one word answers. 

Hot Potato Lab

This year, my school is teaching our high school Biology classes through College Board's Pre-AP program. Even my Honors Biology class is going through Pre-AP Biology. One of the concepts that I have to teach with this curriculum that I haven't before at this level is Surface Area to Volume ratio in the context of how it plays a role in the size of cells. 

I teach this in AP Biology and we do the Surface Area to Volume diffusion lab using agar with phenolphthalein and sodium hydroxide and soak different sized cubes in dilute hydrochloric acid. I love this lab, but don't want to do it with my honors bio students, since they would do it again in AP Bio. So of course, I did a google search and found this hot potato inquiry lab. 

From the lab linked above (which is the answer key to the lab), I put together a google doc for my students to work with. Here is the link to that lab document.

I loved this lab, and I'll be keeping it in my curriculum for sure. Like many of the labs I do with students, I was so busy helping them trouble shoot and prepare that I forgot to take pictures. 

My students liked this lab because they got to use our Vernier temperature probes, and they love to use the probes. Since they used probes, students could just poke the probe right into the potato. They could also see through graphing the data what was happening with the rate of temperature loss. (But maybe this made me more excited than them.)

Here are some tips for the lab. I forgot to bring a crockpot to keep the potatoes hot during the day and I didn't cook them ahead of time. I have an incubator in my room whose maximum temperature is 60°C. In the morning, I put them in the incubator. Right before this last block class I put the potatoes in my classroom microwave for 5 minutes to make sure they were cooked all the way (soft), then put them back into the incubator until students needed them. The key is that they start with the potatoes hot. Even just being in the 60°C incubator was enough to keep the potatoes warm enough for the lab. 

None of the potatoes started at the same temperature, but that didn't matter since we were looking at the rate of temperature change for each of the potatoes.  Students used Google Sheets to collect their data and then graphed a scatter plot, added trend lines and the equation of the trend line. We then discussed how the slope of the trend line is the rate of heat loss from each potato.