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I’ve been tutoring some local students in high school chemistry. They learn things like the difference between an element and a compound, how to calculate how many kilograms there are in a mole of sodium chloride, and exactly how much NaOH you would need to neutralize a certain amount and strength of HCl. Most of…
Just a note to address the gap in posts. For the last nine weeks, I’ve been doing a long-term substitute gig at the middle school where I taught for six years, and which my kids attended. It was fun being back in the middle school classroom again for a while! I taught about weathering and…
Everyone was talking about the total lunar eclipse that happened this morning! Except they were calling it a Super Blue Blood Moon. Forget all the hype — How does a lunar eclipse work, and why was this one special? “Super” moon A supermoon is a little closer to Earth than a normal moon, so it…
A few days ago, I had lunch with my sister whose kids are younger than mine. We started chatting about money and kids’ spending and allowances. And grades, and motivation. We’ve tried a lot of things with my kids (now 13 and 17). Here are my three favorites. iAllowance iAllowance is an app that’s been…
Today I read yet another article in support of redshirting kids with summer birthdays. That is, instead of enrolling them in kindergarten when they’re old enough (according to your state or school), you wait a year. So instead of starting kindergarten at barely-five (or not-quite-five), they are sometimes six before they start. Instead of being…
If your Makerspace or Lego Robotics classroom has been active for any amount of time, you’ve probably accumulated gallons of unsorted Lego pieces. Close your eyes, and you can probably hear the sound of a kid digging through a box of bricks, looking for the right connector or beam for a new robot. And digging, and digging, and digging. And even though this hunting is part of the fun, it can get frustrating really fast. It can slow down creativity and innovation.…
The news broke on the International Day of the Girl – Boy Scouts of America will welcome girls!! This news was not well-received overall. Here are the three trending stories I see on Google right now when I search “boy scouts,” one day after the announcement. The end of men? Really? My daughter is 13…
Dutch Blitz is an odd-looking little card game. (“A Vonderful Goot Game!”) I had seen it on the shelf before but didn’t buy it, and now I’m sad that we didn’t get it sooner! The game has a cute but strange Pennsylvania Dutch motif, but the game play is a mix of cooperative solitaire, Spoons,…
Being in the high school marching band means being a geek. Unappreciated. Misunderstood. But whether your kid is in the band or not, there are a lot of things to appreciate and even admire about them. I worked all day recently at my kid’s school when they hosted a marching band competition. Twelve bands from…
Sixth graders think they know everything about space. They’ve learned the names of the planets; they’ve made the Oreo moon phases. They’re set. But they arrived in my classroom with a lot of misconceptions that, while based on reason or observation, are just plain wrong. I wanted a way to show them that they have something to learn about astronomy, and to gauge what they already know and don’t know. Astronomy concepts like these frequently aren’t taught again after middle school! As a result, we have a lot of confused adults walking around.
Introducing the Astronomy Pretest. I gave this quiz on the first day of the astronomy unit as a way to learn what they already knew – and I told them so. Sometimes I’d tell them ahead of time that the quiz was “diagnostic.” That they should do their best and tell me what they know, and to answer every question to their best ability, but it wouldn’t hurt their grade to be wrong.
Want to try it? Before you read any farther, click here to take the quiz. It’s 45 True/False questions and will only take a couple of minutes. Don’t look anything up! Guess if you need to.
When you’re done, read on…
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