Designing Skyscrapers

Tall buildings and modern designs are fascinating aspects of architecture and engineering, so it is no surprise that students love the idea of learning more about these as they take the role of a designer.  Studying existing buildings, learning about how they are designed to withstand natural disasters while still being aesthetically pleasing, is our starting point for the unit.  As a part of this, students choose a skyscraper of interest to research and then replicate its design using Sketchup (CAD), a free download, to create a scale model.

Empire State Building

Our next lesson lets them use what they've learned to design their own skyscraper, again to scale in Sketchup.  I love seeing the creative ideas they have!

Finally, using a budget and a limited amount of time (just like real engineers!), teams construct a skyscraper together.  The finished product needed to be to scale, and able to withstand both wind and earthquake!

If you'd like to use this lesson with your class, you can obtain the full lesson plan here.

Building a Musical Instrument

One of my students' favorite units is our unit on the Physics of Sound.  Middle schoolers LOVE music, whether they are in the Fine Arts program or just active listeners to their MP3's.  So, when I tell them they are going to have a chance to learn more about those sounds and then design an instrument of their own, they're pretty excited!

We start with learning the physics of sound by doing several online simulations along with some research.  Then, with that knowledge, we learn about sound waves using a Slinky toy.  Be prepared to address potential silliness with this BEFORE the lab.  We always review the difference between having fun and being immature :)  

Designing the instruments, requires some research, but most students jump right in to figuring out how their instrument can be the best.  The instrument needs to be able to play three different notes and repeat those notes three times.  YouTube videos are great for this if your school has access to that.

We used a variety of recycled materials - some that I provided in the classroom and others that students chose to bring themselves.  During the planning and design phase, students draw their project and create a materials list before construction begins.

One of our more interesting final products was this carrot recorder:

If you'd like the full lesson, it is available here to download.

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BlogLovin' is a great tool to organize the blogs you follow and let you read relevant material quickly.  They even have an IPhone app to let you read conveniently on your phone!

Friday Freebie

For those teachers using a projector or SMARTBoard type device in their classroom, it is easy to display your classroom agenda for students.  Today's freebie is a customizable PowerPoint that lets you easily type in your changes each day and then prominently display the agenda, along with reminders and your objective.  This always gets a positive comment from my administrators when they do a walk through or an evaluation too (extra bonus!!)  I like not having to write it on the white board each day!  Download it here.

Summer Lesson Planning!

Like so many teachers, summer is more than just a time to relax (although that's a good thing too!).  This year, it was time to add some new things to my teaching.  While my team-mate and I have been working on revising our pacing guides, we're also freshening up our lessons and adding some new ones.  You're probably doing that this summer too!

We're using MS Excel to create our pacing guide and color coding what we revised and what still needs to be done.  That's keeping us on track!  

I actually got motivated to start revising the "look and feel" of some of my lessons with a challenge that was posed by the Teachers Pay Teachers group, so in addition to adding new lessons, I'm getting more creative with the presentation of some of the old ones!

Our first week's challenge was to change an old lesson and I chose to make a small change to the cover of one (below).  More importantly, I've found lots of new resources for new products like digital papers and fonts to make creating lessons more fun for me and the kids!  ‪#‎tptsellerchallenge‬