Every year, we celebrate Earth Day on April 22nd. If you have some flexibility in your curriculum, it is great to take a day or two and do some fun Earth Day activities. If you already teach science, it is really easy to pick a topic that should fit into
When I switched from teaching middle school to high school, my new district required all new hires to participate in a new teacher program our first year. Even though I already had 5 years of teaching experience, I took monthly classes with a professional development specialist whose job it was
Card sorts are one of my favorite tried-and-true ways to formatively assess my students. I use them all the time!1. You can use them at the beginning of a lesson to check for prior knowledge2. You can use them in the middle of a lesson as a checkpoint for the
It’s almost Valentine’s Day! When you teach teens, it can be hard to fight the candy and hormones…. so how about embracing the holiday instead of fighting it? I’ve compiled a list of Valentine themed activities you can do this year. MIDDLE SCHOOL VALENTINE’S DAY IDEAS 1. Make borax crystal
When teaching physical science, motion is by far my favorite unit. You can do so many fun experiments ranging from motion graphing and building rockets to Newton’s laws demos. Any time you can incorporate graphing into the curriculum it is great since creating and reading graphs is a skill that
One of my favorite case studies to examine with students is the tragedy that occurred at Lake Nyos. Located in Camaroon, Africa, Lake Nyos is a lake that formed in a volcanic crater. While villagers thought the volcano was dormant, it was slowly releasing carbon dioxide into the lake. One
Want a fun way to change up how you assess your students? While there is value in giving multiple choice assessments (students need to have these test taking skills to pass the ACT and SAT), I also like to change it up. Not all students do well with multiple choice
One of my favorite parts of the cell unit is teaching about membranes. If you ask me, they are by far the most important part of the cell. Everything the cell does is because it is responding to signals received by the membrane. While many students think the nucleus is
Guest speakers can be such a powerful tool to your classroom and are hugely underutilized. I don’t think I truly understood their value until I started teaching project based learning. Part of PBL includes having a public audience (you can check out a blog post on this topic here). As
Getting out the microscopes is one of the best parts of teaching biology. I love hearing the ooh’s and aah’s when they finally get the specimen into focus. But if you’ve taught biology before you know it can also be one of the most exhausting units- constantly running around the
Understanding why cells are so small Why are cells so small? And why are we made of so many? It seems like it would be easier to be made of 100 or even 1,000 cells instead of trillions. One of the reasons we teach students that cells are small is
Movies is often much more engaging than lecturing to your students. Having students actually see extinction happening in the documentary Racing Extinction is much more powerful than me talking about it. While I don’t usually show full length movies in my classroom (more often clips), they can be a great