At the end of the class period, my middle school students want to rush out of the room as soon as the bell rings. Sometimes, I’m in the middle of a sentence and other times they leave the lab in a mess for the next class. Any suggestions for dealing with this chaos?
—Brad from Hawaii
Middle schoolers seem to be in such a hurry! They want to line up at the door long before the end of the class, waiting to sprint out the door. And I’ve heard teachers say “Wait a minute—we’re not finished” as students stream out of the room as soon as the bell rings. Perhaps it’s because they’re so full of energy. This high energy level can be fun to work with, although learning how to channel that energy is a challenge.
The end of the class period can be hectic (especially right before lunch or at dismissal time). I found it essential to have routines in place so the transition was orderly and we used our time productively. These routines should not be a set of arbitrary rules—they should be based on the established expectations of your classroom environment.

It sounds like you have two expectations for the end of class. Your first expectation is students leave the room ready for the next class to come in. Post it in your classroom. It helps if students have some ownership in the routines to meet this expectation. Ask them: What do we need to do at the end of the period so the next class can be ready to start? Ask each team for a few suggestions, and reserve the option to add some yourself. You’ll find a lot of duplications, but essentially you’ll see things such as pick up litter, turn in assignments, return lab materials, push chairs in, and store technology and notebooks in the designated places. Pick out a few essential ones and post them in the classroom under this expectation. Designate a team member to take charge of each group’s clean up tasks. You may need to model the routine for shutting down any technology and returning the laptops or tablets to their proper place. Make sure places to return materials are labeled and accessible. Students should know and use these routines so that you do not have to issue orders every day, other than a reminder “time to clean up.”
The second expectation is for students to pack up their thinking. If students race out of the room, it’s easy for them to forget what they did (and you’ll look at a sea of blank faces the next day). After materials are put away (or as students are doing so), use an exit activity to help them reflect on or summarize what they did and what they learned. This can be a brief note or response to a prompt, a group summary, an entry in their science notebooks, or adding to an electronic discussion via programs such as Moodle, Edmodo, or an addition to a class blog. They can be creative, too—a drawing or an acrostic in which you give the students a word and have them write a sentence or phrase starting with each letter related to the lesson. I’ve read about teachers having students post sticky notes on a class flip chart page on their way out. The teacher can use the exit activity to get a sense of what students learned or questions they still have.
Schools are not always student-friendly when it comes to bell schedules. Students may only have a few minutes to get from one class to another, even if the rooms are on opposite ends of the building. As part of your routine, make every attempt to dismiss your students in time so they can make the trek. You could ask a student to be the official timekeeper and give you a reminder sign when there are a few minutes remaining in the class period for packing up materials and their thoughts.
Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ms_sarahbgibson/1266617074/

Just because the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic games are over doesn’t mean the enthusiasm students brought to school in August has to be. This installment of the NBC Learn/NSF videos series Science of the Summer Olympics—Maximizing the Long Jump of Bryan Clay focuses on the decathlete’s training for just one of the ten events he hoped to compete in. While Bryan Clay failed to qualify himself, you can find footage of the two American decathletes who did using the search term “decathlon” at the NBC Olympics site.

Optimization, or the process of getting the best result given the constraints, is the focus of the NSTA-developed lessons that connect to this video. While other athletes focus on optimizing their technique for one sport, decathletes have to optimize for ten—long and high jump, shot, 110-meter hurdles, discus, pole vault, javelin and 100-, 400-, and 1500- meter runs. And all are played in just two days!

Sounds grueling. But hopefully this video/lesson package and the rest of those in the Science of the Summer Olympics series will have the opposite effect for you!

–Judy Elgin Jensen

Paralympic long jump silver medalist. Image courtesy of Ryan Taylor.

Video

“Maximizing the Long Jump of Bryan Clay” features Bryan Clay, an Olympic Gold medalist in the decathlon, and focuses on the technology used to study his form and movement as he carries out the most technologically complex event of the decathlon—the long jump. A stereoscopic, or 3D, camera provided by BMW is used to track Clay’s every movement during a jump. Clay, his coach, and engineer and biomechanist Melvin Ramey then analyze the videos to help Clay try and improve both his speed as he approaches the take-off board and, in turn, his jumping distance.

Lesson plans

Two versions of the lesson plans help students build background and develop questions they can explore regarding design optimization. Both include strategies to support students in their own quest for answers and strategies for a more focused approach that helps all students participate in hands-on inquiry.

SOTSO: Maximizing the Long Jump of Bryan Clay models how students might investigate a question about a projectile’s trajectory.

SOTSO: Maximizing the Long Jump of Bryan Clay, An Engineering Perspective models how students might design a launching device and use the device to test factors that influence the distance a projectile can travel.

You can use the following form to e-mail us edited versions of the lesson plans: [contact-form 2 “ChemNow]

The cookbook metaphor is often used to describe confirmatory labs. Much like cooks in a diner or fast-food establishment, students follow a standardized procedure (recipe) to get predictable results. But I suspect we also want students to act as chefs sometimes–creating and testing new recipes and evaluating the results.
As the authors of Open Ended Inquiry suggest, an awareness of levels of inquiry can help teachers scaffold learning experiences: confirmatory, structured, guided, and open inquiry. Using the content from a typical chemistry class (reaction rates), the authors illustrate three strategies that can be used to support open inquiry. They also provide a rubric and suggestions for helping students generate experimental ideas. Eight Ways to Do Inquiry presents a “taxonomy” of teaching strategies that foster inquiry, including protocols, modeling, taxonomy (not just in biology), product testing, design challenges, and discrepant events. [SciLinks: Inquiry]
The author of Adding Inquiry to Cookbook Labs describes how labs in her school were updated to enhance inquiry skills by adding opportunities for more student involvement. Teacher demonstrations were followed by student exploration. She provides examples of two updated investigations that were already part of the curriculum.  The cooking metaphor continues with Now You’re Cooking. The author shows how traditional investigations in heat transfer can be upgraded with extensions to basic recipes. [SciLinks: Heat Transfer, Conduction, Convection, and Radiation]

A Virtual Tour of Plate Tectonics show that not all inquiry investigations have to be hands-on. In this minds-on investigation, students examined real data on plate tectonic boundaries, using a chart to organize and summarize their findings (provided in the article). A recent Science Scope article has more ideas: Using Google Earth to Teach Plate Tectonics and Science Explanations  [SciLinks: Plate Tectonics]
If your school is using tablets (e.g., iPads), Tablets as Learning Hubs has suggestions for science applications to support inquiry, including using the camera as a magnifier or to investigate lenses, and using QR codes, probeware, and applications that are free or low-cost.  For more, see the blog Tablets as Microscopes.
The process of Fracking for Natural Gas is a topic in the news, and the author has suggestions for web-based resources. See also the articles The Keystone XL Pipeline  and Fracking Fury,  published in previous editions of Science Scope.
Don’t forget to look at the Connections for this issue (September 2012), which includes links to the studies cited in the research article. These Connections also have ideas for handouts, background information sheets, data sheets, rubrics, etc.

In Memoriam: sadly, we report the passing of Irwin Slesnick, whose many contributions to NSTA and the broader realm of science education include the NSTA Press books Adventures in Paleontology  and Clones, Cats, and Chemicals. Please see an obituary posted to The Bellingham Herald.

 
During the first weeks of school many preschool and kindergarten teachers have their students draw self-portraits as a way of getting to know children’s fine motor skills and developmental age in drawing, as well as teach vocabulary for parts of the body and sense structures. (See the lovely gallery of self portraits from Clipston Primary School in the UK.) Copies of the beginning-of-the-year self-portraits are kept in a portfolio of student work. When students make final self-portraits for the year, they can be used to see the child’s growth in abilities in fine motor skills and in using symbols to convey meaning, such as hearts drawn around a family group.
Drawing a self-portrait is just one of many activities that can be part of an investigation into the human body. Children may have stories to tell about visits to the doctor, the birth of siblings, learning to use the toilet, losing a tooth, and developing physical abilities such as jumping or riding a bicycle. The Illinois Projects in Practice article, “Helping Children Sketch and Draw from Observation,” lists the many ways drawing and telling stories relate to Illinois Early Learning benchmarks throughout the curriculum.

As children get to know the parts of their body, they can make comparisons with the body structure of other animals. They begin to understand that animals can be grouped—worms have no legs and a soft body, insects have six legs and a hard exoskeleton as contrasted with our four limbs, soft exterior and hard skeleton. Using playdough to make models is one way to document observations. If the children find an earthworm or a cricket, contain it for an hour so children can observe it and record their observations by drawing, modeling with playdough, clay, or pipe cleaners (aka “fuzzy sticks”).

Children like to make models of their family pets. When children find their larger playdough models won’t stand up, ask them, “What helps you to stand?”, beginning a discussion about bones. Pipe cleaners or sticks representing the skeleton can be added to the models to make them able to stand. In the September 2012 issue of Science & Children I write about looking at bones and making models to learn about our bodies. Children are often very interested in bones—read about Jake in Scotland who began collecting bones when he was 6 years old with the support of his father. To observe animals with and without bones, visit the Smithsonian National Zoological Park’s OctopusCam and view the giant Pacific octopus–and its human visitors as they view it in the Invertebrate Exhibit.