One Teacher's Adventures

Over the past couple weeks, my Grade 8 Science students have been learning about the structures of plant and animal cells.  The culminating project for this topic was to create a 3-D model of an animal cell, highlighting the organelles that can be seen with an electron microscope. For each organelle, the students needed to create something that looked accurate, and needed to label each structure.   Here are a few of the completed models: I think they turned out beautifully!    Looking for more great tips and ideas for middle school? Subscribe to my email list and receive an exclusive FREE sub plans resource. It includes plans for math, ELA, science, social studies, and Core French. Click  here  to subscribe.

Last week, my Grade 8 Science kids completed a lab to observe the characteristics of living things.  In it, they compared dry yeast and salt, then put each into apple juice to observe the reactions.  The first step in the lab was to describe the dry yeast and salt in a table, looking at the colour, size, texture, and shape of each. When I looked over the lab reports my kids had turned in, I was more than a little disappointed with their observations.  I had more than half of the class simply writing the word "small" for size of the grains, and I even had about 5 or 6 kids write "salty" for the texture of the salt!  This made me realize that I hadn't given them enough clarification on what was acceptable, scientific language for observations.  To help them understand the level of description I wanted, we completed a simple activity.  We went outside, and I asked each student to find a leaf.  We have a beautiful maple tree that takes up a large portion of