Today we finished up our test on the Taxonomic Key and started in on evolution.  The kids don’t seem to be as interested in it as I am.  That disappoints me.

Today I introduced a Taxonomic Key Lab with real live organisms. it’s a very cool little exercise with a set of questions attached to the lab itself.  I made it a summative assessment because of it’s breadth and depth.  It’s a great way to finish out the classification section of our text.  Next up, the Theory of Evolution!

Today we finished up our classification lab.  The charts look pretty good, but I noticed that the lab reports, the important writing of the data is less than optimal.  I’ll be assigning some writing assignments in order to bolster our skills in that area.

Today we started on a Taxonomy Chart Lab.  We divided up into teams of 4 “researchers” and set out to describe what we find in nature.  We are using bags of 10 different “organisms” (cereals) and creating a system to determine the levels of classification.  Each researcher is responsible for their own writing but they will work as a team to come up with a consensus on the characteristics and chart.  The directions are as follows:

1. Observe your organisms carefully.

2. List and describe at least three characteristics for each.  It is smooth, rough, round, square, etc…

3. Create a chart for all of the organisms dividing them up into classification levels.

4. Answer these questions:

How are these organisms the same?

How are these organisms different?

How did you decide which traits to use?

Do you think that every single example of each species will have the same traits?  (This is important because of the diversity in the bag!)

Why is a taxonomic key helpful in this exercise?

Tomorrow we will be constructing the chart with the organism fossils glued to a chart, with labels of each classification.

Today I handed back the quizzes form last week and some kids were a little shocked at their grades.  I offered a chance to earn back some points by completing a writing assignment over 4 questions from a worksheet we went through as a warm up.  They have a chance to earn back 8 points from it to help out their quiz grade.  Now we’re moving into classification of species and evolution.  This is my favorite subject to teach and I’m looking forward to some good discussions.

Today we worked through a little bacterial growth worksheet before we took a quiz over this week’s material.  Ii can definitely tell the kids don’t want to get back into test mode.  It seems like they just floated through this week without trying to retain much of the information we talked about.  Next up, classification.  I don’t give out a lot of homework, but 2nd period is supposed tolook up the kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species for humans and one other plant or animal.  That is their easy homework.

Today we worked through a guided reading of chapter 1 in our text.  I’ve already made the quiz for tomorrow and a lot of the questions come right off of the worksheet.  We also went through a Powerpoint on the History of Life.  We had some crazy bouts of chatter throughout the class period.  Let’s hope we can turn it around and keep our focus on school.

Well, I have never seen so many kids who WANT to do worksheets and read out of the book.  I usually try my best to get my students to think for themselves and work outside the worksheet/text realm in order to stay current and keep things exciting and challenging, but apparently that isn’t very popular.  At least it wasn’t with the questions I assigned yesterday.  They were asked to explain at what point do the top 8 elements in nature come together and exhibit signs of what we would call “life” and they thought that question was too hard.  Well, I hate to say it but I’m going to keep challenging my kids.  There is so much more to life than reading a text and questions on a worksheet.  I’m going to keep pushing my students to think hard and write well.  Their success is dependent upon more than rote memorization.  Tomorrow, it gets harder.

Today we worked on a little writing exercise on the chemistry of life.  The students wrote down the top 8 elements in life and they are supposed too give me three examples of each found in nature.  Also, they are to answer the question: “at what point do these elements come together and exhibit signs of life?”  This will be a hard and varied set of answers, I understand, but I want to know how they view early life.  Also, they are to tell me what RNA is and what makes chemistry “work.”

The grades go out at 4pm today!!  If there are any questions about the gradebook, they need to get with me.  I’ve gone over their grades several times in class.

Well, the kids were kinda crazy after getting back into their seats.  We switched out our text books for the new Bacteria to Plants curriculum text and had a little discussion on what life is and what it isn’t.  We also revisited the BIST training.  I hope we can keep up our great momentum.