February 18, 2022
On day 10 I was home with my child due to inclement weather, which meant busses weren’t running. Because of the pandemic, our school board was closing rural elementary schools if busses weren’t running due to staffing issues. So I had to leave something for an on-call teacher since my school was open. I had what I wanted to do with the class already prepared, so I went ahead and left it for the teacher. When you find out about the buses being canceled as you are about to head out the door, it really throws a wrench in things, especially when school starts at 8:15 am. That doesn’t leave much time to prep something for a sub. Sometimes we just have to do the best we can with what we’ve got.
The warm-up was another visual linear pattern. Students first determined steps 4 and 0 and then developed the pattern rule. Next, I had students organize their information in a table of values and then manually graph the relation.
Next, students tried a couple more warm-up questions on the topics of simplifying fractions and solving equations using parallel number lines.
The main focus of today’s lesson was to complete the density lab that was set up for the class. Ordinarily, I would not have left this for an on-call teacher, however, the materials needed to be returned to the science lab at the end of the day, so I was kind of stuck.
Part 1 of the lab required students to graph mass vs volume of 3 quantities of water. After completing that step, students were asked to think of a different way that they could calculate or find the mass and volume.
Part 2 of the lab required the use of an online graphing calculator. I like using Desmos. Students were to use the linear regression formula to graph the mass vs volume for 3 quantities of centi-cubes using displacement.
Finally, step 3 required students to calculate the density of an irregular shape using displacement. Each group was given a soapstone and needed to calculate the mass vs volume of the soapstone and graph the data.
Not all groups finished the lab, but since the materials were going to be sent back to the science department at the end of the day, they had to use data collected from other groups that did finish the activity.
The activity didn’t run as smoothly as if I were there, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles sometimes. Life!
That’s it for today. I hope something in here was able to help you on your teaching journey.
Have a great day!