Well the time crunch finally did me in. The time to write whiteboards and present them takes too long to do in one hour. I have 10 groups per hour... oh wait I mean for each hour I have 10 groups. I originally thought I would only have 8. The reality of only 25 boards has come in to play a couple times already. So after my first 2 hours when I realized I was going to be short 5 boards I decided to make a run for the depot. And of course once there I thought... Well heck what if I'm doing something in all of my physics classes and want to whiteboard in Biology? So I now have 50 whiteboards and a need of a way to tell my wife I spent more money on my classroom.
In other news my buggy cars came in the mail today as well as some of those cool new push/pull force-o-meters. Which is convenient since I am considering starting motion next week. I also went back to my Junior high and commandeered the ticker timers I had purchased years ago that no one but me ever used. Although I am still contemplating having some groups use the metronome and marker method just because it was so fun watching Kal try and do that! That should be fun.
Finally I decided I am going to try and work some of those reasoning tests into my class just to measure where the kids are. I did the Islands Puzzle with them today. I can't wait to read the responses this weekend.
Are any of you planning on giving the mechanics baseline test?
O.k. I know that last question was out of left field but there it is I typed it. There is no way I can go back now. Well I mean I guess I could cursor up and hit backspace a few times, but seriously who has the time?
You can never have too many boards!
ReplyDeleteI don't give the MBT to my college-prep kids. I'd rather give the FCI and the Lawson test.
Also, great idea about doing the puzzles. Now I'm going to have a bunch on hand for when class finishes early! Let us know how your island puzzle goes. I wonder if their will be any correlation between the puzzle responses and FCI gains?
I plan on giving out puzzles every few weeks through the semester. I am interested if I can track improvement in reasoning ability as the units progress.
ReplyDelete10 groups! WOW! How many kids do you have in your class? My group size is 4 students which gives me 9 groups for one of my honors physics and 8 for the other. Managing the physical space for labs and the white boards is a real challenge.
ReplyDeleteI made groups of three with a couple groups of 4. I have 32 kids per class. Luckily my room is one of the bigger ones in the science department so I can manage the space. I am still struggling with how to display the boards because my room is very long but not very wide so we make more of a long rectangle than a circle. It is sort of hard to see everyone's board so I have gone to more of a Pata-esque presentation method.
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