Newton (November 15)

I taught my second block yesterday.  It went well, but lecturing is not as fun as doing demonstrations.

The clickers worked well, for the most part, but there were some technical difficulties.  When I connected my laptop to the projector, it changed the resolution of my screen so the font on my presentation was a little hard to read for students in the back of the room.  I was able to remedy that by reading the questions and answer choices aloud.  Most of my clicker questions were multiple choice, but I had two write-in questions.  One was just numbers, and another was text.  The numbers worked fine, but the text was a little tricky.  It ended up delaying the lesson enough that I found out that I over-planned and we did not get to the practice problems from the textbook.

I think if I went through the lesson a second time it would run smoother and I would be able to finish in time.

Allie finished the mini-unit today with her webquest.  Our classroom teacher will extend the unit to finish the PS. 10 SOL and their test will be next week.

First Lesson (November 14)

Today's Lesson on Motion was a success.  I used demonstrations to introduce the unit and started off with distance, displacement, speed, velocity, and acceleration.

Tomorrow I will be covering Newton's Laws, gravity, and friction with my flipchart presentation and clicker questions.

I actually incorporated clicker questions into Todays lessons for the misconception questions, but I just used ExpressPoll and a PowerPoint presentation.  So tomorrow they won't need as much of an introduction as I originally planned. 

Today the lesson actually went a lot quicker than I expected.  When I was planning it I was concerned that I was trying to cover too much in one block because it was an entire chapter in their textbook.  When i had observed my TIP teacher teaching his lessons in chemistry I was surprised at how long they took for each concept and each term, but somehow I finished early.

I will definitely revise my lesson for tomorrow and add in more activities.  I may even extend it beyond Newton's Laws and get into energy and momentum if the students seem to be grasping the content well enough.

Overall it was a very successful day and I am very excited for tomorrow.

dates and topic (November 2)

We realized that the monday and tuesday we wanted to teach our unit are actually teacher work days, so that isn't going to work out.  The only dates that seem to work are the following week, the 14th, 15th, and 16th.  Our topic is Newton's Laws. 

The way we decided to break it up will be to have both of us teach on Monday, my clickers lesson on Tuesday, and Ally's webquest on Wednesday.  Monday will probably be a demo day.  I will teach the first block and Ally will teach the second block.