Earth time Line

O.k. I admit. I do not enjoy teaching the time periods of Earth's history. I am not sure other than it always turns out rather boring to me and it seems to my students also since they doze much more often than normal.

So, few years back I decided to try a different method. I give each student a time period to learn about. The next day I have them draw a depiction of their time line...with the amount of space they get proportional to the amount of time it lasted. This helps them stay awake and helps them at least learn one of the time periods in great detail.

The last day I have each student stand in front of their time period and teach the class about what happened. And then...we hang it up for all to see. So awesome. And me? Well I get to take pictures and then blog the entire thing to share with others.

exciting times today

Today in AP Biology we were supposed to have a test. Oh the whining I heard when I first came in was incredible. "OH please, please, let us take it on Monday, please, we will do anything!" MMM? I think some of them meant it. Oh the benefits of bribery.

In 7th grade we had our big boat competition. We have just finished learning about Archimede's principle of buoyancy and displacement. The assignment...build a boat no bigger than 6' x 6" x 3". A few boats sunk fairly fast (I think we might need a lesson on water proof material) Others held a great deal of pennies.

Our winner.....EMMA LYNN! Congratulations Emma. Your boat held 470+ pennied before it sunk. Unfortunately because you were our photographer we don't have a wonderful picture of you. But still you win!

Later

Teddy Graham Day

It's Teddy Graham day in 8th grade biology. During this class we use teddy grahams and a story about the land of Teddy Grahams and the swamp thing. You see the swamp thing can only see bears that have their hands up! Each year He can only eat 8 bears and each year each pair of bears can only have 1 baby bear (mating is completely random).

We begin the population with one hands down bear and 23 hands up bears. From generation to generation we see the population begin to change and the number of hands up bears decreases and the number of hands down bears increases until there are no more hands up bears for the swamp thing to eat.

This is one of the kids favorite activities to do every year. At the end they get to eat all the bears they want..YUM!

Brain Day!

You are probably wondering what it means...brain day. Well, here are a few pictures of my 9th grade anatomy students dissecting sheep brains. They had a lot of fun and were able to see many things like the corpus callosum, the arbor vitae, and the cerebrum vs. the cerebellum. If you don't know what these things are, just stop one of my anatomy students in the hallway and ask them.

Enjoy!