Non-NGSS Agendas

Since we have covered the three NGSS Units that we are covering this year, for the remainder of the year we will be doing supplemental activities that may or may not be structured like typical NGSS assessments.

I will be posting these agendas here in this one post with a brief desciption of the aim for the assignments, updating as we go.

Week 26 Marine Plastics and Plastic Chemistry Week 
- For this series of assignments I wanted to continue on from their capstone projects, looking at resource consumption. I also wanted to bring back in some chemistry as a review for the CAST and for the students to refresh on for high school science. 

Week 27 Finishing Plastics and Video Project
- For this assignment I wanted them to sort of review material from the year or work on answering a science question that interested them, but was never covered in class. So the aim is both to give them support in researching an interesting topic and somewhat indirectly review the material from the year.

Week 28 Finishing Video Project

Week 29 Cast Review

Week 30 Cast Testing and Bio Activity
- For this week I am bringing in some biology material with a simple engineering challenge. The students will be designing beaks that could be used to pick up rice and beans. 

Week 31 Bio Activity
- This week they'll be testing out their beak designs and then we will move onto an inquiry topic about the structure of DNA.

Week 32 Bio Activity and Random
- This week will have the students finishing with DNA and then has some random activities and challenges built in. The schedule can be somewhat unpredictable and the students will not have iPads this week. 

Week 25 Agenda

Below you can find links to the Week 25 Agenda. This will be updated as the week passes and at the end of the week a reflection will be shared in a different post. 

Week 25 Agenda

Week 23 and 24 Agendas and Assessment 4.3 Overview

Below you can find links to the Week 23 and 24 Agendas. This will be updated as the week passes and at the end of the week a reflection will be shared in a different post. 

Week 23 Agenda

Week 24 Agenda

Also, as a general resource, this is what my preliminary plan for this whole assessment will look like. (Things will certainly change as I see what my students need extra support with, but I find it really helpful to have a very general idea of how I might want to approach the whole task.)

Assessment 4.3 Overview

Reflecting on Unit 4 Assessment 1

This assessment was somewhat influenced with my students' practice with the example CAST questions online. Beyond the obvious need to incorporate more math (something I am a bit unsure where to incorporate as the SEP for mathematical and computational thinking is not really covered much in the standards about motion and force, but tested using that standard in the practice questions), I felt like my students needed more practice analyzing given data dn interpreting models or diagrams that were given to them, forcing them to make assumptions about the data. This assessment heavily looked at those two skills.

This unit was somewhat tricky to me, I am used to incorporating light boxes, lenses, and mirrors into any unit on waves, but our school doesn't have any supplies for that, so I approached it differently. This made the unit less interactive than I would have liked. Getting something for the students to interact with in this assessment is something we need to factor into the budget. 

Introduction

We started with a Pear Deck about how we can use wave interactions to understand the layers of the Earth and as part of that introduced the types of waves. This allowed me to bring in more Earth Science (on the Earth, not space, level to this unit). As one of my goals I am trying to make all the phenomena and introductions have another science domain tied in. 

Part 1

There is really not much to say about part one, it was designed to introduce the key vocabulary and basic concepts for the unit and did that. It wasn't particularly interesting, but it was functional.

Part 2

For part two the students worked with provided data about Tsunamis, with our focus in this part being about ocean waves. As part of this I used Google MyMaps to plot out the locations, which worked well and was a familiar interface for the students, so they had no trouble using it. The students has to use the provided data to create a graph or other visual representation and form a claim based on that data. The open ended nature of the graphs allowed me to assess which students better understood how to represent data in a graph. 

Some examples of their graphs and other representations are presented below. Although they were all different, there was value in each one. 

Part 3
In part 3 the students were presented with about 7 models and a data table to complete looking at the waves of the electromagnetic spectrum and how they are absorbed, reflected, or transmitted through the layers of the atmosphere. This one was, obviously, focused on light waves. 

This assessment was a struggle for many of the students. The models are not always specific, and it is not as if one picture gave them all the content for a single row or column of the table: they had to put it all together and make assumptions. For their conclusion they discussed how the interaction of EM waves and the atmosphere supported life on Each (bringing a bit more about life science and earth science.) Their answers were great an varied between the protection from Gamma and UV rays, to the greenhouse effect, and to visible light.

Part 4
Part 4 was the part of the assessment I was most worried about going in. They were looking at one of a few scenarios and discussing how soundproofing could be used in that situation. This part of the assessment focused on sound. 

I gave them three options to look at, sound walls by a freeway, sound proofing in the band room, and sound proofing to practice their drums in the garage. They students research materials, discussed benefits and costs, and wrote up a formal proposal. The biggest issue was that, while I want how they present the material to up to them, I want to add more structure in specifying the expectations. 

Overall
I thought the assessment went well, though part 3 was rather challenging for some students. I liked having the focus on the different parts being about different categories of waves. I would like to bring in an interactive element, which could go in part 1, though part 1 still needs to have them working on constructing a basic model of a wave, so it would have to allow for that as well.