Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
The picture of a convergent tectonic boundary pulls together our immersion trip to Eminence, and the geology we’ve been studying this quarter. We saw granite boulders at Elephant Rocks; climbed on a rhyolite outcrop near the Current River; spelunked through limestone/dolomitic caverns; and looked at sandstone and shale outcrops on the road to and from school.
Last year, our middle schoolers named their business Chicken Middle. I was a bit skeptical, but the name stuck. This year, thanks to a lot of help from the school community (thanks to the R’s for the Ruby Coops), we finally have chickens (thanks to Mrs. C. for fostering chicks for us over the summer).
And today, we had our first egg. The students were a little excited.
It looks a little lonely sitting there by itself in the egg carton (thanks to Mrs. D., Mrs. P., and everyone else who donated egg cartons), but with a little luck it will have lots of company soon.
Awesome video by Kurzgesagt explaining “Why You Are Still Alive“.
The Tabletop Whale blog by Elanor Lutz, has a focus on scientific illustration. It is a wonderful intersection of science, math and art, such as in this beautiful animation of a muscle in motion.
She has animations of butterflies and birds in motion as well.
Perhaps not surprisingly, my middle school students have a difficult time wrapping their heads around the idea of multiple frames of reference. We were in a canoe on the Current River and I asked the student paddling in the rear of the boat to look at me and answer the question, “Are we in the canoe moving, or are we steady in one spot and everything around us moving?”
This resulted in some serious cognitive processing. And she still has not gotten back to me with an answer.
Another student, faced with the same question, thought it over overnight and concluded that it was a riddle. He figured the correct answer was that the canoe was moving and the land was still. I asked him to think about it a little more (because he was only half right).
Interestingly enough, I’ll be teaching my Advanced Physics class this block, and the first chapter has a neat little section on coordinate systems. I’m curious to see if the 11th and 12th graders have an easier time with the concept.
A documentary on the educational system in Finland which is ranked as one of the best in the world. They have little homework, no standardized testing, and are rather Montessori-like.
A couple of my students asked for worksheets to practice drawing atoms and electron shells. I updated the Atom Builder app to make sure it works and to make the app embedable.
So now I can ask a student to draw 23Na+ then show the what they should get:
Draw diagrams of the following atoms, showing the number of neutrons, protons, and electrons in shells. See the example above.
I guess the next step is to adapt the app so you can hide the element symbol so student have to figure what element based on the diagram.
Mike Schmidt passed along this link to Lisa Winter’s post collecting 21 GIFs That Explain Mathematical Concepts.
For example:
