Teachers' Days, Delights, and Dilemmas: Wayside Teaching
Wayside teaching is all about building and sustaining positive relationships with students. Before we explore this concept further, take a moment to examine your wayside teaching attitudes, approaches, and actions by completing the self-analysis in Figure 1.,Volume 42, Number 3
Date a Rock
This lesson shows students that age-dating rocks involves counting atoms and comparing the counts. Students use simulated rock samples, which show a highly magnified selection of 128 atoms, each sample with a different proportion of the atoms of two different elements: a parent radioisotope, and its daughter product. By counting the parent radioactive atoms and knowing the half-life of those atoms, students can figure the number of half-lives since the sample solidified, and therefore the age of
Library 2.0: A Journey of Metamorphosis
Libraries as we know them have changed over the years to become Learning Commons—less like rooms with books and more like learning spaces with a wide variety of resources.
Temperature Change
Middle School, difficulty level 2. Use the given information to find the temperature.
Graphic Design: Using Symmetry to Create Corporate Logos
This activity teaches students to describe three types of symmetry, to categorize symmetric figures based on type of symmetry, and to create figures using different type of symmetry. The activities use familiar logos and signs to show how symmetry is used in the world of design, and to help differentiate between the different kinds of symmetry used in these examples.
Climate Change: Connections and Solutions, Grades 6-8
This two-week interdisciplinary curriculum unit encourages students to think critically about climate change and to collaborate to devise solutions. Students learn about climate change within a systems framework, examining interconnections among environmental, social, and economic issues. Lessons are aligned with national science and social studies standards but may be used in other classes as well. The first week of this 2-week unit lays the foundation for understanding some of the forces behin
Shopping Mall Math
Students participate in activities in which they develop number sense in and around the shopping mall. Two sets of activities, one developed for younger middle-grade students and one for older, deal with size and space, estimation, measurement, and applications involving percent.
Concurrent Lines, Medians, and Altitudes
Explore the relationships between perpendicular bisectors, the circumscribed circle, angle bisectors, the inscribed circle, altitudes, and medians using a triangle that can be resized and reshaped.
Student Perceptions of Action, Relevance, and Pace
How do teachers know their students are engaged? The results of a study in which middle school students' perceptions of academic achievement were analyzed.,Volume 36, Number 4
Silk: Caterpillars
If you listen closely, you can hear the sounds of a critical element in the production of silk--silkworm caterpillars dining on mulberry leaves. This episode of the two-minute radio show Pulse of the Planet focuses on how silkworms are raised. In the episode, available here in MP3 audio and text formats, a guest biochemist describes the silk farming process, noting the silkworms' dependence on large quantities of human-supplied mulberry leaves. The host points out how much silkworms grow in leng
Algebra tiles (grades 6-8)
This online manipulative enables the student to explore the meaning of multiplication with variables. The student arranges tiles representing variables and the values one and five on a work space. This array representation can be used to model multiplication problems such as x(y + 2) and division problems. The size of the variables can be changed with a slide bar. Instructions for using the manipulative, eight activities with a lesson plan, and a link to the National Council of Teachers of Mathe
Green Science: Investigating green—Creating surveys to answer questions
Being green means different things to different people. Some suggest that being green means saving energy, not wasting paper towels, going solar, harnessing wind, using less fertilizer, or buying products that are organically grown. Given that being green can mean a lot of things, what does “being green” or “going green” mean to both you and your students? To find out, we need to make informed decisions by collecting data. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to become familiar with
Indicators of Middle School Implementation: How Do Kentucky's Schools to Watch Measure Up?
Using responses of school personnel to a statewide survey, this study examined the perceived level of implementation of key tenets of the middle school concept as outlined by This We Believe: Successful Schools for Young Adolescents (National Middle School Association, 2003) in schools designated a Kentucky School to Watch as compared to nondesignated schools.,Volume 32, Number 6
Geologic Time: Eons, Eras, and Epochs
This resource guide from the Middle School Portal 2 project, written specifically for teachers, provides links to exemplary resources including background information, lessons, career information, and related national science education standards. This publication contains resources designed to do three things. The first is to complement teacher content knowledge and its relationship to the nature of geologic science. Geology is not a laboratory based science lending itself to traditional notions
Design Squad - On the Moon Activity Guide
In this activity guide, NASA and Design Squad team up to inspire a new generation of engineers. The guide offers six hands-on challenges that bring engineering and NASA's moon missions to life for kids at events, and in school, and afterschool programs. Two activities—Launch It and Touchdown—are for events and grades 3-8. Three activities—Roving on the Moon, Heavy Lifting, and On Target—are for grades 6-12. And one activity—Feel the Heat—is for grades 9-12.
Synergy, Percussion 1-Introduction
Synergy is a percussion quartet. This teacher-made tutorial video provides step-by-step playing instructions for the piece of music titled Synergy. (01:51)
TED402 Session 2 Spring 2012
Educational Psychology with Jeff Miller 02/01/12
Charles Dutoit and Matias Tarnopolsky
Cal Performances Director Matias Tarnopolsky and maestro Charles Dutroit discuss the program that the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra performs in Berkeley including works by Kodály, Liszt and Brahms on January 28, 2012.
Sarah Garlick JAN 31, 2012 Sarah Garlick: “Wild Stone: Climbing the unclimbed, from the Arctic to Arabia,”
With professional photography, audio clips, and short videos, Garlick
tells stories from her latest two expeditions: a journey to the
granite big walls of South Greenland, and an exploration of the Wadi Rum
desert in Jordan. Garlick’s presentation focuses on the common
core of both expeditions: a quest to find—and climb—untouched clif
