Breathe in, breathe out. Everything is going to be just fine. Your students will come in with the work done because, well, you saw them do it in class yesterday. Finally, it's time to test out the zipline. It's time to put 12 hours of lesson planning into motion.
First period is always the guinea pig. What's the best way to set the lesson up? Who should go where? What problems are we going to encounter? How am I going to make sure that every student is productive? Where are they going to stand? How do I get the doll back? How many trials can we run in the time we have?
Very few of these questions have accurately planned responses. I knew that we were going outside. That was basically it. In my head, things worked out great. Students paid attention, were efficient in cycling through their trial runs, wrote down everything they were supposed to, and celebrated. There were no celebrations, some kids "forgot" to write down their data, most were slow to bring their dolls up for trials, and some were off in la la land.
Even still, we carried on. Before we went outside, students laid their work onto their desks and I checked them for completion and (as much as I can for a class of 38) accuracy.
Very few of these questions have accurately planned responses. I knew that we were going outside. That was basically it. In my head, things worked out great. Students paid attention, were efficient in cycling through their trial runs, wrote down everything they were supposed to, and celebrated. There were no celebrations, some kids "forgot" to write down their data, most were slow to bring their dolls up for trials, and some were off in la la land.
Even still, we carried on. Before we went outside, students laid their work onto their desks and I checked them for completion and (as much as I can for a class of 38) accuracy.
We went outside and ran trials. We only had time to go through one trial per group, but it turned out to be a lot of fun. What we did afterwards was head back to the classroom and discuss the best distance to set our zipline. Using the speeds of each distance, students worked within their groups to determine the optimal distance that the zipline should be set at.
What an awesome conclusion to a project that had its difficulties. I'm looking forward to feedback from the blogosphere, twitter, and/or anyone who can find ways to improve this for next year. I will do this again, no doubt about it, but things will be done differently. Maybe I need to start from higher? Maybe my students need to do all of their work in class? Maybe I can structure it better? Not sure yet.
Happy (Barbie) Fishing, errrr, Ziplining
RSS Feed
