Teachers Pay Teachers Snow Much Fun Sale!

Get ready for TPT Snow Much Fun sale!

January 10-11 – $1.00 deal days. On Sunday and Monday, 1/10 & 1/11, you will have “snow” much fun buying these resources that are marked down to $1.00! Click on this link https://bit.ly/2GgBEBu to find these resources.

January 12-13 – $2.00 deal days. On Tuesday and Wednesday, 1/12 & 1/13, the TPT Snow Much Fun sale features resources that are marked down to $2.00! Click on this link https://bit.ly/3iux0ww to find these resources.

January 14 – 20% off seasonal resources. Thursday, 1/14, you will find a wide variety of seasonal resources that will help you prepare for your Winter lessons. Click on this link :https://bit.ly/3le0KPY to find these resources.

January 15 – Freebie Friday! Friday, 1/15, we have tons of FREE resources for you! Download away! Click on this link https://bit.ly/3iA0rx7 to find these resources.

January 16 – 50% off bundles. Saturday,1/16, you will have “snow” much fun buying our bundles that are 50% off! You won’t find prices lower on bundles at any other time. Enjoy! Click on this link https://bit.ly/2HPkE5u to find these resources.

January 17– $1.00 Digital Resources. It is the LAST DAY of our Snow Much Fun Sale. We want to celebrate you with some fabulous DIGITAL resources that are $1.00. Today 1/17, you will find tons of $1.00 Digital Resources here https://bit.ly/36y8d8y

How to Force a Password in Google Forms

Google Forms can be used in a bazillion ways. One way is to review and reinforce concepts already taught. Follow these steps:

Create a Google Form and create your first question.
Choose “Short answer” as the type of question.
Then, click the three dots in the lower right corner of the question and then select “Response Validation.” This means that students won’t be able to advance past this question without entering what you decide is the correct answer.
You have multiple options for what format your answer should be. You can make the correct answer be an exact number or a range of numbers. You can make it a word or phrase, URL or email address. You can also only allow responses of a minimum or maximum size. When you decide what format your answer must be, enter it on the line.
Enter a custom error text such as “:Use ALL CAPS,” “Try again” or “Use your notes packet.” Note: If you don’t enter a custom error text, the form will tell students the correct answer when they get it wrong!
Finally, to make the response to this question essential to moving on, slide the “Required” toggle to the right
You can add additional questions to the same page so that all questions must be answered correctly before moving on, or you can add new pages so that each question must be answered in turn before moving on. Your activity should be hard enough to keep it interesting but easy enough to prevent frustration.
After students have completed all of the parts of your form and gotten all answers correct, set the Confirmation message to “Good job!” or some other message. To set the confirmation message, click on the Settings wheel on the top of the form. Then, click on “Presentation.” On the Presentation tab, you can customize your Confirmation message.

Cells – Digital Escape Activity

My students love escape rooms, and I’m a big fan of letting them play and learn at the same time. One activity I added this year is a cell digital escape activity.

This week, we’re working with cells – organelles, cell theory, and so on. There’s a lot of vocabulary in this unit so I’ve prepared a lot of the usual vocabulary activities:

task cards that I use for bellringers, exit slips, individual review, whole class review, even a round of scoot
digital task cards that are great for individual practice because they are self-checking
pixel magic reveal puzzle which reveals an image of a cell, one pixel at a time, as question are answered correctly.

But I felt I needed a little something else. Something to help students practice their vocabulary with some fluidity and something to engage them in a review of material as we begin back after winter break.

I wrote this digital escape room for my students over break. I prefer physical escape activities, but the pandemic has left me with hybrid classes sometimes and completely remote classes sometimes, so I had to switch to digital. The benefit of digital is that students can use it independently or in groups. While working remotely, students can still participate in groups by using the Zoom breakout function, or they can work alone if they prefer.

Here’s the walk through of the solution to the cell digital escape activity. Let me know what you think!

Build Engagement with Escape Activities

You can build engagement in your classroom with escape activities.

What is engagement?

Engaging students is the result of a lot more than just coincidence. It is the product of 3 specific ingredients:

Intellectual Curiosity. Curious students are more motivated to learn and experience more connection to the content. The NGSS encourages the use of phenomena to build curiosity.
Appropriately challenging material. If the work you’re asking students to do is too easy or too difficult, they will be frustrated and bored and unengaged. Work that is appropriately leveled for your students will help them remain engaged.
Rewards. Engaging activities often reward participants along the way – In casinos, slot machines are fun because they provide variable rewards – 3 coins one time, 10 coins another time, zero coins most of the time. In the viral phenomenon Fortnite, rewards such as boxes of supplies are reinforcement to encourage players to continue playing. The rate of reinforcement is variable which also helps to encourage more playing.

Why escape activities?

Escape activities have the ability to provide all three of these ingredients. Classroom escape activities are based on the escape room challenges that have become so popular over the past several years. If you’ve never been to an escape room, they are an entertainment experience in which you and your team of people solve puzzles in order to escape from a locked room. Using escape activities in a classroom helps build curiosity. If you design your escape activity with a funny theme (the evil professor has stolen the Halloween candy) or a bizarre event (escaped prisoner stole the blueprints for a museum), students will be curious to see how it plays out. Escape activities can also be calibrated to be appropriately challenging for your students. Give hints where appropriate, make it harder when students need more of a challenge. Escape activities also provide reinforcement – if you build 4 or 5 puzzles into the challenge, solving each puzzle serves as an intrinsic reward that encourages continuing the challenge. After I introduced the first breakout, my students were hooked. They begged for more breakouts and I happily complied. The trick is to make the puzzles connected to the material you want them to learn. It’s best if the puzzles are hard enough to be challenging without also being too hard and making them frustrated.

Try your first escape activity

Are you ready to build engagement in your classroom with escape activities? If you’ve been hesitant to buy an escape activity because you’re not sure how they work, here’s a great opportunity for you to test one out for free! This full length digital escape activity reviews and reinforces weather vocabulary and can be completed by students either independently or in (face to face or virtual) groups. Click here to download your free weather vocabulary escape activity!

Create your own digital escape activity

If you’re ready to move on to more challenging pursuits, some basic beginning steps for digital escape activity creation can be found here. You can also download a free escape activity template here.

Impact!

Impact craters produced by comets, asteroids, and meteoroids are fascinating. Scientists thought that Barringer Meteor Crater in Arizona was a volcanic crater until studies in the 1960s revealed that it was caused by an extraterrestrial impact. The death of the dinosaurs was thought to be due to climate change until the discovery of the Chicxulub crater in 1978. The impact of Shoemaker-Levy 9 in 1994 was the first time an impact was directly observed. They are fascinating to students and are a natural extension to many of your middle school science topics.

How do impact lessons address the NGSS?

Asteroids, meteoroids and comets are all fascinating for students and studying them addresses NGSS MS-ESS1-3 Earth’s Place in the Universe. In this standard, students are expected to be able to classify solar system objects based on their features, compositions and locations within the solar system.
A unit on asteroids, meteoroids and comets can be used to address the science and engineering practices of asking questions, developing and using models, planning and carrying out investigations, analyzing and interpreting data, constructing an explanation, and engaging in an argument stemming from evidence.
Studying asteroids, meteoroids and comets can also be linked to the cross cutting concepts of cause and effect, systems and system models, stability and change, and scale proportion and quantity.

When to teach impacts?

The science of asteroids, meteoroids and comets can be learned in nearly any earth science unit. Asteroids, meteoroids and comets fit naturally into your solar system and astronomy unit – How are they formed? How are they observed? How are their orbits calculated?

Have students conduct controlled experiments to try to create impact craters that resemble simple or complex craters on the Moon.

When you’re teaching the rock cycle, include the differences between earth rocks and space rocks. When you’re teaching geologic time, include impact driven mass extinctions. When you teach relative and absolute dating, include overlapping craters on the Moon.

Impact activities for middle school classrooms

What factors affect craters? Use this hands on activity to have students examine how the mass, diameter and velocity of an asteroid affect the size of the crater that is produced.
Impact slide show – Use these 13 Interactive Google slides to allow students to drag and drop correct answers instead of OR in addition to taking notes. This slide show includes an explanation of what killed the dinosaurs and the differences between comets, asteroids, meteoroids, meteors, and meteorites. Students will also learn about Barringer Crater, Tunguska and Chelyabinsk.
Virtual Field trip – I like to use this virtual field trip to Meteor Crater to give students a little “awe” with regard to meteor impact sites. Great for independent work also.
Is it a Meteorite? – This intense hands on activity is for the more advanced students who are ready to use physical and chemical properties to determine if a rock is a an earth rock or a meteorite.

Where can you buy meteorites?

Hands on activities in which students can observe meteorites are a perennial favorite. Higher level students can conduct basic observational experiments or more advanced chemistry experiments to determine if a sample of rock is a meteorite or an earth rock.

The range of prices for a meteorite varies. Larger meteorites are more expensive. Witnessed falls are more expensive. Rarer meteorites are more expensive. But you can still purchase small pieces of common meteorites for about the same cost as a sample of earth rocks.

Here are some websites to start your search:

Meteor image is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Free Digital Escape Activity!

I’m offering a free digital escape activity for teachers who haven’t tried one yet and are wondering what all the fuss is about! Continue reading to learn how you can download your free weather vocabulary escape activity.

My students love escape games – here is a link to a blog post about why escape activities are so popular in classrooms. I’ve added a bunch of digital escape activities to my store this year and I hope you’ve had a chance to check them out. You also might want to try your hand at creating your own escape activities – here’s a blog post that gives you the beginning steps to creating your own!

If you’ve been hesitant to buy an escape activity because you’re not sure how they work, here’s a great opportunity for you to test one out for free! This full length digital escape activity reviews and reinforces weather vocabulary and can be completed by students either independently or in (face to face or virtual) groups. Click here to download your free weather vocabulary escape activity!

I hope your 2021 is filled with health and happiness!

5 cool Reindeer fun facts

Did you know these 5 cool reindeer fun facts?

Reindeer have the longest migration of any land mammal in the world – about 5000 km (3100 miles) – and travel between 12 -34 miles (20-55 miles) per day at a speed of about 60-80 kpm (37-50 mph).
Reindeer are the only species of deer in which both the male and female have antlers. Both males and females shed their antlers every year and grow new ones in the spring and summer.
The pads on reindeer hooves shrinks in the winter to give them better traction on ice and snow.
Reindeer hairs are hollow tubes to provide insulation.
Reindeer are also known as caribou.

Here’s a bonus reindeer fun fact – Reindeer are awesome swimmers. Check out this fantastic video. (My students say it looks like reindeer flying, so ….)

Reindeer Photo by Frans Van Heerden from Pexels

Free – Saturn and Jupiter Great Conjunction – Free info!

Hi Science Teachers,

There will be a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in December and it’s going to be so exciting for those of us who are fond of the night sky! This Great Conjunction between Saturn and Jupiter in December will be a special event for all of the United States so get ready to watch!

I just created this website for students to learn about the December conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. I’m happy to share. If you want a copy, please either post your email as a comment on this post or email me at justaddh2oteacher@gmail.com. This conjunction info is free to you and I’m happy to share!

The great thing about the conjunction is that it will be visible to nearly everyone (weather permitting) even without a telescope or binoculars, although there certainly will be many telescopes and binoculars pointed at it on December 21st. It’s visible without any tools – astronomers call that “naked eye” – for the entire United States which is exciting.

Teach one thing five times

When it comes to teaching science under the NGSS, one truth stands out. Teach one thing five times, not five things one time. In terms of content, less is more. In terms of depth, more is more.

Here is an example. Back in the old days, I would teach symbiosis in about 20 minutes. Four definitions- symbiosis, mutualism, parasitism, commensalism – and give an example of each. Done and done. Now, we introduce the concepts of interactions with examples and allow students to draw connections between the different examples. Then, we introduce the vocabulary and have students connect each term to the group of organisms that demonstrates each type of symbiosis. Then we have them research other species with each type of symbiosis. A few vocabulary activities – sentence stems,

teaching science for depth rather than breadth

crossword puzzles, games, etc. – and a writing activity. The whole thing takes at least 5 class periods.

Teaching for depth rather than breadth sacrifices content. We won’t be able to teach every scientific concept every year. There just isn’t time.

But that sacrifice gives us the freedom to explore each concept deeply. Exploring deeply doesn’t mean repeating the same activity or the same lecture. Allow your students to live in an environment that explores the concept for a long period of time. This increases understanding and retention, but also allows us to build in skill development. Exploring the same content every day allows for the practice of many science and engineering practices – asking questions, defining problems, developing models, planning and carrying out investigations, analyzing and interpreting data, using mathematics and computational thinking, constructing explanations, engaging in argument from evidence.

The key to designing a unit that has depth is to provide lots of varied activities, each focusing on a different science and engineering practice.

Another example. Teaching the rock cycle by exploring how rocks change, reading informational text, writing about rock changes, and examining samples of rocks for similarities and differences. Practice with vocab activities interspersed throughout.

I just rewrote my geologic time unit to incorporate more practice and to make it accessible during hybrid learning. I included multiple practice activities to review and reinforce as well as an escape activity.

Another unit that is better for having been expanded in my Newton’s laws unit. I added a problem based assessment as well as daily practice activities for digital and hybrid learning.

What units have you expanded to include more depth?

Cyber Monday (and Tuesday) Sale – 20% off!

Happy Holidays!

Everything in my store will be 20% off on Monday and Tuesday (11/30-12/1) with an additional 5% off when you use code CYBER20.

To make shopping easier, please check out my digital catalog.

There are live links for my best selling products including winter themed products such as Snowman Genetics, a Science of Winter digital escape activity, and a a Reindeer Adaptations slide show. New to the store this month are a whole bunch of pixel art digital worksheets including a few winter themed ones you might like!

Stay safe, Friends. I hope your holiday season is filled with laughter!