Teaching Science Efficiently

I created this lab as a fun activity for halloween! This can be a fun way to introduce kids to the concept of surface area and to have them practice skills such as: making observations, making hypotheses, identifying variables, measuring liquids with a graduated cylinder, and drawing conclusions. I used this with my biology students, but it could easily be used in a general science or chemistry curriculum! A more advanced group could potentially also measure and graph the mass change between the

This lab addresses the following learning objectives: I can make a wet-mount slide,I can focus a microscope, andI can compare/contrast cells in wet mount and prepared slides. Students will look at various prepared slides then make wet-mount slides of their cheek cells. The accompanying powerpoint has timers, instructions, and attached instructional video for how to make the wet-mount slide.

This worksheet accompanies the following Glencoe virtual activity- http://www.glencoe.com/sites/common_assets/science/virtual_labs/E08/E08.html. As a teacher, it is convenient to print this out ahead of time to have students fill in their answers as they are working (rather than typing everything into the interactive).

The University of Berkeley has created an amazing set of readings related to the basics of evolution. This set of guided questions can be used to accompany the reading. The worksheet was created with the intention that students write answers it their notebook, but could certainly be modified by adding spaces in between each question if a teacher wanted to make it into a worksheet for each student to write on.

This rubric gives the opportunity for students to self-evaluate by circling how well they think they did. The teacher can then come through and evaluate the students with a different color on the rubric.