Thursday, January 24, 2013

Instructional Strategies Blog #1


Cohesion Lab

In this lesson, students use inquiry-based strategies to explore the concept of cohesion. It's a great hands-on way to see cohesion in action.
This lesson plan was found at http://www.lessonplansinc.com/lessonplans/water_cohesion_lab.pdf
This lab would be used to enrich what the students already know about the properties of water.
Students will work in pairs with the following supplies: pipettes, pennies, small beakers of water and some graph paper.
Students take turns filling the pipette and slowly dropping water on the penny until it no longer fits and spills over. The students need to keep track of how many drops they recorded on their 3 trials.
The pairs fill out a data table with each others results and come up with an average for each student.
In pairs they construct bar graphs illustrating their results and answer the analysis and conclusion questions. 
 The pairs report their averages to me and together we graph the class data.
To accommodate students, you can allow them extra time to complete the graph or analysis questions. They can have their partner record their results or preform the dropping of water if they are unable. They can also only graph one set of data.







2 comments:

  1. This lesson is great for making the concept of water cohesion interesting to students. I really appreciate your comments on how to make student accommodations.

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  2. I never liked science and it found it harder to learn because we did mostly book work and less labs. I'm a hands-on person so information attained from only reading would not stick. So good job on being a lab person. This project, for us non-science folks, does indeed sound interesting.

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