Sale Sale Sale!!

If you haven't heard yet, Teachers Pay Teachers is running a sale 2/27-2/28. It's starting tomorrow!!

EVERYTHING in my store will be 20% off plus the TpT discount.

I know I"ll be buying some items as well!

Cell City

I wish I could say that the idea of cell city was my own, but this is definitely not true. I have no idea who come up with the idea first, but Google helped me put this project together for my students.

I gave my students the options of building a model of a cell city or a drawing. They had to include the important organelles (they were given a list) and everything had to be labeled. This was my first year doing this, and I was very excited!

There were a few things I would change:

1) I placed students into groups of 4. I wish I would have assigned them to certain "jobs".
2) This was an in-class project, so I wish I would have emphasized time-management a little bit more.
3) I also teach math, so my tables are in rows. I wish I would have taken the time to place the tables into groups to prevent group-to-group conversations.
4) I told my students the cell city analogies, and I wish I would have given them the opportunity to come up with the analogies on their own, or at least try to match them.

If you plan to do a cell city, take the time to plan it out, and you will be grateful for your results!

Here are pictures of my students' work!

Lever Lab

Now, I love all science, don't get me wrong, but I am super excited about starting the biology unit with my 7th graders! It's my all time favorite. Hopefully I will be doing a lot of exciting activities in this unit so that I can share!

We ended our physical science unit with simple machines. There were so many things we could have done with this unit, but with the lack of time we had to choose one activity. We chose to do a lever lab! It was a very simple lab, but covered the important concepts of levers.

We first gave the students a stack of 5 pennies (taped together), a ruler, and they could use a pen or pencil. They used this to construct a lever.

The objective of the lab was so that students will understand the relationship between effort force, resistance fore, and the location of the fulcrum. In this lab, the pennies represented the resistance force, the student's finger representing the effort force, and the pen represented the fulcrum.

Students would follow these steps:

1. Construct a lever using the ruler as the straight bar and the pen as the fulcrum.

2. Place the pen beneath the ruler at the 6 inch mark. Place the stack of pennies over the 1 inch mark.

3. Push down on the 12 inch mark on the ruler. When you push on the ruler, you are exerting an effort force.

4. Move the fulcrum to the 8 inch mark and repeat step 4.

5. Move the pen back to the 4 inch mark and repeat step 4.

And then, we students were to answer these questions before discussion:

Conclusions:

     1) How did your effort force differ between the three trials?

2) Explain how increasing and decreasing the distance between the effort force and the fulcrum affected the effort force.  What type of lever is this?

3) How does this relate to where you push on a door when opening it?

Also, I will be throwing a SUPER BOWL SALE on my TpT websites as well as my TN site.

My Teachers Pay Teachers sale will run from 2/2-2/3 and will be 20% off!!!

My Teachers Notebook sale starts today 2/1 - 2/3 and will be my 20% off plus an additional percent off from teacher's notebook!