Lesson Plan Template s41

Lesson Plan template Unit: Science Skills Position within Unit: Variable Title: Using the Science Notebook to build report writing skills.

OBJECTIVES(S) Students will learn the difference between good notes and organization and bad notes and PURPOSE organization. They will learn through doing how to take better notes and use those notes to accomplish tasks including taking a quiz and writing a brief lab report. CA STANDARDS Grades 9-12, Investigation and Experimentation 1.a. Select and use appropriate tools and technology (such as computer-linked probes, spreadsheets, and graphing calculators) to perform tests, collect data, analyze relationships, and display data. Also, sadly… Grade 1. 4b. Record observations and data with pictures, numbers, or written statements. Grade 1 6f. Record data by using appropriate graphic representations (including charts, graphs, and labeled diagrams) and make inferences based on those data. Hopefully, this lesson is on a slightly higher level…

MATERIALS Day one: Handouts of Example notebook entries and questions Day two: Materials for Chemical reaction:

Day three: Materials for Experiment ACTIVITIES This activity spans several days (they need not be sequential: in fact, some time between activities is better) and ramps the students up in terms of general skills: Day one involves Introduction using some sample lab notebook entries to help them identify good and bad ( habits/techniques in notetaking. The focus is on logical, sequential organization and summarizing (tables, Graphs). Days 2 and 3 incorporate a lab activity that you are already doing (content based), and ties it more closely to the notebook as well as giving them an Anticipatory Set) introduction to the types of information that should be included in a lab report. You may (~10 minutes) want to repeat the basic strategy of days 2 & 3 a few times (depending on the level of your class) before moving on to the "Day 4" activity, which pulls the supporting structure of the "pre-writeup quiz" away from the students and forces them to go directly from the activity to their writeup.

DEMO Chemical reaction:

[Activity #1 Name] Don't tell the students what you are doing, just tell them you are going to show them a (~30--minutes) chemical reaction. Reaction: "Elephant toothpaste" Safety You should wear goggles and gloves to

perform this reaction as the 30% H2O2 is quite caustic. In the front of the room (don't let students do this one) pour 200 ml of 30% H2O2 into a large Erlenmeyer Conclusion flask. Add 5-10 drops of soap, and take an initial temperature. Place the flask (--minutes) over a sink or a plastic basin so that students can see it, but that the mess that will be made will be contained. Then add 200 ml of Ringer's Iodine (alternatively, about 1 tbsp of crystalized IK). The reaction will start slowly, but over the course

of several minute the H2O2 will decompose into H2O and O2. The KI acts as a catalyst to this reaction. The decomposition of H2O2 will generate heat, and the soap will trap the O2 released from the reaction to create copious suds.

Next tell the students that you have a reaction that they can do, but first they need to complete some tasks to show that they are ready to do it correctly. Hand out the example notebook entries and questions. Have the students go through the questions and try to pull the relevant information from the notebooks.

Have a brief discussion with the class talking about which sample notebook entry was the most useful, and why. Be sure to go over the important organizational features of the "good" notebook: The presence of an organized data table, units of measurement, Chemical equation, linear instructions and logical organization. Tell them that next week you will have something for them to do, but to do it, they will need good notes from the chemical reaction you are about to do – get out your notebooks and take good notes so you can do the reaction properly. Put the "recipe" for the vinegar and baking powder reaction on the board and have the students conduct the reaction – make sure that they know that in order to "do" the coming activity, they will need to be able to repeat this reaction.

Follow up: At the beginning of a class next week, have the students get out their notebook and repeat the reaction: You will give them NO help with numbers etc. This time there is a twist that you will need to help them with. Have them perform the reaction in a 250 ml graduated cylinder. Sodium Bicarbonate should be added to the cylinder first and add 2 drops of soap to the vinegar (measured in a smaller graduated cylinder) before adding it to the baking soda. [The order matters; if you add the baking soda to the vinegar, the soap bubbles that result will actually lift away a good portion of the baking soda, reducing the reaction] As the bubbles rise they will leave a residue on the walls of the cylinder so you can determine the maximum height. After 5 minutes, you can measure the maximum volume of bubbles and the volume of the remaining liquid. Give a small prize (whatever you normally give to students: a few extra points, a homework pass, a pat on the back, etc.) to the group that produces the largest ratio of bubble volume to the volume of the remaining liquid (which should be those who most closely followed the original directions). Day 2 Conduct one of your regular lab activities that you would normally have them write a lab report on, letting students know that there will be a quiz on the activity at some point in the future, and that it will be open notebook, so the notes they take will, to a large extent, determine their grade. Quiz questions should be tied to the content you want to see in your lab report (see sample Quiz, attached, and writup format that follows. As always, feel free to modify to suit your preferred lab report style). Day 3 Give students the Quiz. After the quiz, assign the lab report, where students can use the quiz, with their answers to the questions, as well as their notebooks to complete the assignment. You need to give the students a handout of what is expected of them, and it should tie into the quiz questions you ask. I've provided 2 different report formats, at different levels. You may want to further ramp students by starting with the simpler, point-by-point format and move them up to the more integrative format. Depending on the level of the class, you may want to repeat the basic "Quiz-report" activity a few times to help students make the connection between their notes and lab reports. Please note that my examples assume that the activity was an experiment; you will have to make some modifications to use with a non-experimental activity. "Day 4" At some point, you will want to stop writing and grading quizzes, and have the students go directly from the lab activity to the lab report. Basically this is just removing the crutch of the intervening quiz. How soon you do this will depend on the general level of the class. If you really like differentiating within the class, you can move the quiz to an "optional" status, so those who don't the help can get on with the higher level activity while those that still find it useful can continue doing it. Either way, eventually, the entire class should be weaned off of the crutch and be forced to go directly from the lab to the report. ASSESSMENT Day 1: After the contest, give your students a small open notebook quiz. The questions of the sheet from the notebook sample comparisons make a nice, brief quiz for assessment. Days 2-4 Quizzes and Lab write-ups serve as assessment devices. REFLECTION As you use the formats here you will begin to notice some mistakes that students in your audience will often make. pay attention to this and make changes in the format handout to try to cut these errors off before they are made. The versions I have given you reflect some of the mistakes my students used to make repeatedly. In order to reduce the length, and because the different audience, I have actually deleted a lot of the suggestions I use in my own versions of these write-up instructions.

Optimum ratio "recipe" for a small reaction with Baking soda and Vinegar (assuming "standard" 5% concentration)

Use 1 gram of Baking soda and for ease assuming 1g=1ml of vinegar (not quite right, but close), then 14.3 ml of vinegar should completely dissolve the baking soda. See FYI section below for complete derivation.

Chemical equation:

CH3COOH + NaHCO3 = NaOOCCH3 + H2O + CO2 Acetic Acid + Baking Soda  Sodium Acetate + Water + Carbon Dioxide (Simplification alert: this actually yields Sodium Acetate and Carbonic Acid (H2CO3), but the Carbonic acid breaks down almost immediately to water and carbon dioxide. For this lesson this detail is not important, but you may want to include this in high level classes)

Derivation of Optimum Ratio:

Molecular Mass of NaHCO3 = 84.0065 amu Molecular Mass of CH3COOH=60.0518 amu So 1:1 molecular ratio (from equation) yields a mass ratio of 0.7148 CH3COOH:1 NaHCO3 Standard vinegar concentration is 5%, so to get 0.7148g of CH3COOH: Mass Vinegar*0.05=Mass CH3COOH; solve for mass Vinegar: Mass Vinegar= Mass CH3COOH/0.05 = .7148g/.05=14.2960g vinegar. Since Vinegar is mostly water, we can assume 1 g=1ml, so 14.2960 ml of vinegar should be close to optimum. Of course, you can't realistically measure better than 0.1 ml, so the final result is 14.3 ml of vinegar for each g of Baking soda. Finally, just to check if the approximation is reasonable: Of our 14.3 g of vinegar, 0.7148g is CH3COOH, the remaining 13.5812 g is water The specific gravity of water is 1 g/ml, so the volume of the water is 13.5812 ml. The specific gravity of CH3COOH is 1.0491 g/ml, so the volume of 0.7148g is 0.7148g/1.0491g/ml = 0.6813 ml. Adding together the volume of water and the volume of Acetic Acid =14.2625 ml. Again, this rounds to 14.3 ml at reasonable measurements.