Year 12 Makes Vocab Keychains

Vocabulary is such a big part of biology, it's almost like having to learn another language sometimes! 

Often in exam answers certain key-words have to be included, or students will have to understand a key word in a question to be able to answer! 

Our Tamaki College Specialist Classroom Teacher suggested taking a tactile approach to learning vocabulary, so I decided to get Year 12 biology to make their own vocabulary keychains.

First, students picked which vocabulary they would like to include on their keychain from these sheets:

Enzyme properties

Enzyme functions

Photosynthesis organelle structure - chloroplasts
Photosynthesis
Factors limiting photosynthesis
DNA replication

Then they cut them out, folded them, and whipped off down to the office to laminate them with Helen.

 When they came back students hole punched and attached each keyword and it's definition to a keychain.

Then we had 10 minutes SSR becoming familiar with their keychain, flipping back and forward between words and definitons.

Students can take them away and look at them over the weekend, or attach them to their keys and keep them until the real exams at the end of the year!

These are a more tactile version of the online vocab sets found in our 12BIO quizlet class :)

Year 12 Makes DNA

Year 12 Bio have been working like absolutely superstars towards their upcoming practice NCEA exam. We have finally covered all of the content (there was a LOT!) and now they are ready to revise and refresh.

On Monday and Tuesday we made lolly models of DNA, and then used them again to demonstrate DNA replication. It seemed to work quite well, and I hope the class enjoyed getting in there and making the models for themselves. 

We used liquorice as the 'sugar' part of the backbone, and added marshmallows as the 'phosphate' - that was the best that we could do for the backbone of the double helix! 

Then we added wine gums as the four bases, making sure to only pick 4 colours of wine gums and only pair them with their 'complimentary base pair.' 

Here's an example of the finished product. :) 

My next post will be some top tips for how to study and revise for exams, both online and off! 

Girls Rugby against Avondale

On Monday I drove the Tamaki College girls first XV to Avondale College, to play a hard-hitting, hard-fought game in the most atrocious weather I have stood in for a long time!

My feet were wet, my toes were numb, the rain was horizontal... I can't imagine how the girls were feeling running around on the field! 

They played with a lot of spirit and I loved their half-time cheer of "SISTERS!"but unfortunately this day the girls were not able to come away with the victory. 

I think my personal highlight of the match was seeing Ripeka chase down an Avondale player as she broke through the girls' line... the girl was sprinting towards the line, aiming to score under the post and Ripeka was thundering after her, catching up... it looked like there was no way to save the try, but Ripeka grabbed her shoulders and tackled her to the ground, twisting her in the tackle to hold the ball up and save the try! What a tackle! 

Earthquake Engineers

By the last day of Term 1 9KMn was ready to put what they had learned about earthquakes, P-waves and S-waves to the test! 

First I shared this presentation with students, who quickly flew through the vocabulary to get to the exciting practical! 

Once students could show me their finished vocabulary I gave them each 30 marshmallows (15 large and 15 small), and 24 sticks (8 long skewers, 8 medium skewers and 8 toothpicks). 

(Next time we do this activity I would give 30 large marshmallows, as the smaller ones proved little use).

The brief was to design a two-story building that would survive through the primary wave of an Earthquake without toppling over or crumbling. 

Jayden and Chase design a pyramid shaped structure. 

We would test their structure in a tray of jelly that simulates P-waves. Students would observe what happened with their design, record their observations, then make improvements to their structure. 

Autymn and Paris designed a cube-and-pyramid 2-level structure and got ready to test it...

The structure proved to be a bit wobbly - back to the drawing board! Perhaps more cross-beams needed? Failure is the best way to learn :) 

The overwhelming success for the day came from a group of boys - PJ, Antonio, Auri and Tionee. Check out the video below to see their design!

Click here to see an example of Autymn's finished engineer work, although noone in class had time to design a poster to sell their idea to an engineering company (on the last slide).

By the end of the lesson I wanted students to have learned that structures are more stable lower to the ground, if they taper or have less mass at the top, and if they have additional support from things like cross-beams.

To revise these principles we finished the lesson off with a class favourite - a Kahoot quiz! Click here to be taken to the quiz I made to summarize this lesson.

The idea for this lesson came from this webpage

Hotspot Animations

Today in our double period 9KMn made play-doh animations of Auckland's volcanic hotspot.

Auckland sits above a hotspot of magma, about 100km under our feet. 

A hotspot is an extremely hot area bordering the crust and the mantle, where temperatures are so high they melt the surrounding rock. There is a plume of hot rock rising out of the mantle as part of the mantles' constantly moving convection currents. It melts the rock and rises through the crust. It forces its way up to the surface and erupts to form a new volcano in Auckland.

How we made animations

Students used play-doh to create the crust, the hotspot, show rock melting, and showing the magma moving up through the crust to erupt at the surface. 

They set up the initial scence and took a photo using their Chromebooks. 

Then students moved the playdoh slightly, acting out what happens in the hotspot under Auckland. After each tiny movement another photo was taken.

One student got the job of adding each individual photo (one group took 51 photos!) to it's own Google Presentation slide. When the presentation is shared to the internet and plays automatically, it looks like a stop-motion animation! 

The final step was to add a few slides at the end of the animation for each student in the group to explain what their animation showed. The student who had added the photos to the presentation shared it to the other students in the group with full editing rights, and students were able to add their paragraph all at the same time (using their own words of course)

Students share their creations

Autymn, Nathan, Paris and Dante made an animation and Auymn posted about it on her blog here.

Please go and leave Autymn's group a comment about what you liked, learned or even what they could improve on next time we make stop-motion animations! 

9KMn Blogs about Alfred Wegener and Continental Drift!

9KMn's blogs are finally up and running, and their first post is about continental drift!

We started the Third Rock From The Sun topic by learning about the layers of the Earth, how the crust is divided up into plates, and how convection currents in the mantle cause sea floor spreading which leads to continental drift.

Students absolutely loved watching the video below at the start of the unit. They convinced me to play it about four times in one lesson!

 After a few days 9KMn was able to understand who all the characters were and what they were talking about when rapping "cut em' out the book notice their shape, they're fitting pretty well there I dare say" and "hey it's Harry Hess and it's after the war, I'm using sonar to map the sea floor."

After a few activities in class such as the classic jigsaw and evidence cut-out for Pangaea, as well as looking at whether certain things count as scientific evidence or not, and looking at Pangaea break-up simulations here and here, students were ready to create and share their new understanding.

They chose what style of creation they would prefer to do. These included a piktochart newspaper article, filming an interview, different styles of writing, creating and performing a rap, or using GOanimate, or Prezi! These links will take you to the criteria students were working off while making their creations.

Some students have finished their creation and included them in their first blog post, while others are still editing and will add them soon! 

Click on their names to see completed blog posts from superstars Talita, Antonio, Anamanu,  Phoenix, and PJ.

9KMn Reflects..

This year I have decided to set up blogs for my year 9 science class, 9KMn. We are still waiting on a few things to be organised (netbooks, logons) before I can do that, so in the meantime I had students email me their feedback on some of the activities we have done to start the year in science.

Here is what some of 9KMn thought:

Sam

For me science is where we get  to experience chemicals to see how things work. From my perspective science is pretty cool because there are a variety of things you can do such as learning how to set a bunsen burner, naming the different equipment in the room and others.

Tyrone

This year, Science has been pretty good and I am enjoying every single part of it. We have learnt the different equipment like Bunsen Burner and all sorts, Hopefully I can be able to learn some more.

Dante

• our class korwai
• our class korwai is when we made our class rules

• all the do now's we have done
• sit quietly ready to listen to the 'who am i puzzle
• we have to list the science equipment we remember

• drawing  the science cube
• when we drawed what we think science is.

• equipment memory game
• testube
• testube holder
• bunson burner
• funel
• gos mat

Anamanu

During the past 3 days including today I have learnt the safety rules for my science class and had made a poster about how to be safe and secure in class. We learnt that cute adorable puppies and kittens are easier to be tested than human beings. I learnt that whenever we enter the classroom we have to do the “Do Now”. The class and I went over the equipment like a Bunsen Burner that can make blue flames.