The info below is split up into the following categories:

• Activities to do as a family (experiments, outdoor activities, etc.)
• Independent activities that the kids can do during quiet time
• Books & Videos

Week 3: Gravity and Spacetime

Family Activities

Tensegrity Structure

There’s no mystery where our children got their love for LEGO. Their dad built a cool tensegrity structure out of LEGO to kick off our learning about gravity. Very cool. Not cool? The only photo we have is on a super dusty surface where it was built in hiding.

Gravity Water Cup Drop

Next we did the Gravity Water Cup From from the Science Guys. We did it over the bath tub and the kids loved it.

Gravity Visualized

While the content of this one was way over the kids’ heads, it was fun and they liked taking part. We built this visualization of gravity based on this video, using a hula hoop, ikea drinking glasses, some stretchy fabric, and clothes pegs.

Given our rather crude setup, the visualizations worked pretty well and gave way to cool discussions around gravitational slingshots.

Pendulum Gravity Experiment

Using the free app Phyphox, we created a pendulum with a phone inside a toilet paper roll under our kitchen table and determined the acceleration due to gravity. A little sophisticated for the littles, but they love recording numbers, making hypotheses, and seeing what happens. The video explanation for the experiment can be found here.

Quiet Activities

I am becoming less picky about these with time. I don’t love the worksheets but the kids like having something to work on at the start of quiet time.

Space Matching

A collection of space mazes

Solar System Word Search

Space Colouring Pages

A collection of fun space-related worksheets

Space subtraction

Books & Videos

We rewatched Bill Nye’s Gravity Episode (S1E6) – the kids love this one

Pete the Cat: Out of This World by James Dean (read aloud because we can’t go to the library)

The Magic School Bus Gains Weight (S4E8) – available on Netflix

Inspiration found from The Cosmic Perspective (Third Edition)

Next week: Prehistoric Creatures!

What Worked Well

The sketchnotes themselves are awesome. I loved seeing the creativity and overall students seemed to enjoy time spent working on them, though not everyone was keen.

As I noted in the previous post, there has been much more eye contact and engagement during class and we’ve had more time for activities since we’re spending less time writing notes. This is a huge win for me. If we can’t have meaningful conversations about scientific concepts, then something needs to shift. I was pleased with the level of engagement when students weren’t focused on getting every detail down at the first pass.

The average class unit test results were approximately 7% higher than each of the two previous two tests. While test results aren’t everything, they are an indication of how well students understand the material (or we wouldn’t use them!), so I see that as a positive.

I’ve found the collaborative notes on Google slides to be a stellar (see what I did there?) way to provide timely feedback to students. I love being able to read through their notes and immediately let them know if they’ve misunderstood a concept or missed something important.

What Needs Tweaking

Not everyone contributed to the collaborative notes. While I didn’t expect there to be full buy-in, one of the challenges with the collaborative notes is that students can see when someone else didn’t contribute.

Another challenge is that we don’t have Chromebooks or other tech in the class at all times. This means that when we had time at the end of class to work on Sketchnotes, the students didn’t have an easy way to access the full notes from the lesson unless they used their own devices. I don’t mind students using cell phones for this purpose, but it does exclude those without devices. It is also too big a temptation for some students to go down a not-so-related rabbit hole.

Next Steps

Overall I’m really pleased with our first shot at Sketchnotes and am looking forward to continuing to encourage students to use visual note taking to help them engage with concepts. We’re kicking off the Physics unit and I’m going to provide them with a hard copy page of text notes for each lesson, which they can use for creating their Sketchnotes. I’ll also be providing them with more direction about specific things to include in their Sketchnotes to better help scaffold pulling out the big ideas for students who are still struggling in that regard.

To infinity & beyond!

Observations so far:

Students are awesome. Not that this is a new finding, but it’s nice to be reminded of how unique & creative teenagers are.

Uploading the slides to a shared Google Slides has been great as a formative assessment tool. This has served as a quick way for me to check for understanding and to highlight any key info a student may have missed. I’ve been using the comment feature to tag individual students on their sketch notes so that they see the comment and can update their notes.

Not everyone is bought in (yet?). I added a slide at the beginning of each day’s notes that contains a list of all of the students’ names. I am asking students to put a smiley face symbol next to their name once they’ve uploaded a sketchnote, which makes it easier for me to follow up with those who aren’t contributing. Students don’t have to put their names on their sketchnotes, so this was my workaround.

Discussions are better. So far, students are making more eye contact and coming up with more thoughtful responses when we’re having discussions in class.

We’re still adjusting. There are many more tweaks to make. Some students are frustrated at the pace in class (not allowing time to write things word for word), but I am continuing to remind them that we’re having meaningful discussions in class, noting key concepts, and then revisiting the material to make sure we’ve captured all the details.

I gave the students a list of key words and soon the markers were in hand.

Once completed, students uploaded their finished sketchnotes to a shared Google slides presentation. Here are some of the first few that were uploaded – aren’t they awesome?

Looking forward to seeing some of what comes next as we start into some new content. Tomorrow we start learning about the movement of the moon (did somebody say Oreo cookies?).

Not one to waste any time, I reordered our units in SNC1DF and set Earth & Space: the Study of the Universe next on our calendar. My idea was simple:

• Have students listen in class and jot down/sketch key words or concepts.
• Provide ample time in class for hands-on activities, sketchnoting the day’s key ideas, and practice.
• Have students upload their sketchnotes each day into a shared Google Slides presentation.

Here is why I’m excited about this idea:

• Pulling out the Big Ideas and key terms is a challenge for grade 9 students. I think this will help them practice identifying what is most important
• All of the research points to this being a more effective way for students to encode & recall information. An effective & efficient memory is important in science (though I’d argue understanding is more important – see the next point!)
• When writing notes during class, I find students aren’t engaged or listening. They are so focused on voraciously writing down all the details that often they don’t even know what they’re writing.
• By working with the material after the lesson, I’m hopeful students will sit with the material a bit more. I see this happening in two ways: 1. being more engaged & conversational during times that concepts are being presented, and 2. thinking through the material when sketchnoting (how do I draw something I don’t get?)
• When students upload their sketchnotes, they can serve as an immediate formative assessment tool to see how well they understand the material.
• The collaborative presentation provides ample examples of the material, reworked by various students. This means that if a student doesn’t get a concept, they can look at many examples. Or if they see that other students have represented something in a totally different way, we can have meaningful conversations around those differences.

I’m sure there will be many unforeseen issues and pitfalls of the approach, but learning to take in feedback & readjust is a big part of meaningful education!

And really, what’s science without experimentation?

You can follow our sketchnoting adventure on Twitter and in this series of posts.