Physics/Chemistry teaching tips? :)

Corkgirl18

Hey guys, I'm studying to be a Physics and Chemistry and Science secondary school teacher. I only have 1 year down but just thought this would be a good place to come to ask advice on how to make classes more exciting.
I want to be one of those teachers that inspires kids to engage with science.
I've done lots of experiments and shown videos and that kind of thing on placement.
If anyone had links to handy resources it would be great too.
Any feedback is greatly appreciated

Gru

Check out this video for a bunch of science related content and suggestions. There's a load of interesting stuff there that you might find useful.

Link.

another good one to check is VSauce

Hope these help! And good luck.

Justin1982

Corkgirl18 wrote: »

Hey guys, I'm studying to be a Physics and Chemistry and Science secondary school teacher. I only have 1 year down but just thought this would be a good place to come to ask advice on how to make classes more exciting.
I want to be one of those teachers that inspires kids to engage with science.
I've done lots of experiments and shown videos and that kind of thing on placement.
If anyone had links to handy resources it would be great too.
Any feedback is greatly appreciated

A few thought experiments generally wakes up the most unambitious of students. Get them to imagine getting into a super fast accelerating rocket that keeps getting faster by lets say 1000km/s every second. Then get them to imagine the rocket accelerates all the way up to being 1km/s slower than the speed of light. Then get them to imagine the rocket accelerates by another 1000 km/s over the next second so that the rocket is travelling faster than light. Then when you tell them that what seems very reasonable is actually impossible as light is the limiting speed!

pvt6zh395dqbrj

I heard of a girl who used to spend 80% of her time teaching the regular course work and then 20% just chatting about current sciency things like LHC, space stations, tokamaks etc. Then, when it came to test time there was always one optional question about the stuff that she had just rambled on about. No marks for it or anything.

When she graded the tests she found that everyone, always answered the optional question and that the answers in general were much better than the answers from the course material questions.

Another idea I heard of which apparently worked really well was to split the class up into groups of no more than 4. Then give them a step by step excercise to work through. Then instead of teaching chalk and talk style, the idea was to go around to each group and discuss the excercise with them, helping them to come to the right conclusions themselves.

When I was in school we made a food pyramid and I really enjoyed it.

pvt6zh395dqbrj

Another thing that one of my teacher friends did was to actually carry out ancient timey experiments to determine the radius of the earth, distance from the earth to the moon etc.. and then use the difference in those answers from the real answers to talk not only about the difference between accuracy and percision but also about the nature of science as a model and to try to impart the idea to students that science can never prove anything right and that it can only prove things wrong.

FISMA

CorkGirl,
What age group are we talking? Primary? Secondary?

Corkgirl18

FISMA wrote: »

CorkGirl,
What age group are we talking? Primary? Secondary?

Secondary, it says it in the question.