Looking to Make Weathering and Erosion more Student-Centered

Making Weathering and Erosion More Student-Centered

Weathering and erosion is one of my favorite topics to teach! I get excited every year when that unit comes up. Why? Because it's something that is reallys so visual, and easy to make hands-on. It's happening all the time, all around us, but many kids aren’t aware.

Introduction

I start off with some very quick stations where students look at some pictures, and small examples of weathering, and real life examples similar to weathering (a rusty nail, a tree root that grows and splits a rock, calcium chloride tablets that are put in a jar and shaken to see how they break down, and chalk is put in vinegar to see how it changes and breaks down. At each station they are asked to make some observations, and answer a simple question or two about what happened.

We then re-group and discuss the changes that we saw. We come up with a common definition of weathering. Then we break it down further -- two of these stations that we saw are chemical weathering, and two are physical. What do they have in common? How can we define those? 

Physical and Chemical Weathering

Then we go into weathering in more detail. This is a great place to do lots of shorter labs (such as this weathering lab pack), and practice experimental design skills, and some other basic science skills like graphing changes, writing conclusions, etc.

I do a lab on chemical weathering where students design how to test the effect of acid on weathering rate, using coffee, vinegar, water, and chalk. They have to get their procedures approved before the proceed, but they will need to come up with a way to measure their changes, and write their procedures and conclusions.

This is a great chance to practice skills such as observation, measuring, and even writing procedures.

For physical weathering we do several small stations on the factors that affect physical weathering (particle size, time, composition). Then they do a summary on these factors, where they have to apply it to a real life situation, and write about it (practice writing and using evidence).

Erosion

Then we move into erosion. This is a great place to integrate high interest activities, because we start off erosion with video clips of avalanches, rivers flooding their banks, etc. Again, we look at what all these have in common to define erosion, and how it is different than weathering. This is memorable for students, and helps them make a connection!

I then structure the erosion part of the unit very similarly. We do a lab on factors that affect stream erosion, and they get to test out things like slope, water velocity, amount of water, collect their data etc. We may do this as a whole group lab, and study stream development.

We also do stations on other types of erosion. I use a big block of ice to simulate a glacier. You can see some great photos and feedback from @teaching_science_irl below. Students at that station compress the ice into a bin of sediments, drag it across, and make observations. Then they draw parallels to the features that are seen on earth with real glaciers and glacial erosion. Similarly, some mixed sediments and a piece of cardboard can simulate erosion by gravity. A hair dryer, or even a straw that students blow on, and some fine sediments can simulate erosion by wind. This allows them to start to see the features, and draw some conclusions. When this is coupled with additional resources, students can really connect!

Here is a picture of wind erosion as students examine which size particles travel farther, and the patterns that they make.

Benefits of Teaching this Way

For us weathering and erosion are a real life topic, but for many students who have never travelled and seen these features it can be very abstract. These hands-on activities help to make it more real, and then allow them to make the leap to test questions and other real-life situations

These hands-on activities help make these concepts more real-life, and keep kids engaged. Once they have the foundation and background knowledge, on the topic, they are then much better able to take it the next step and apply to other real life situations or test questions. 

Wrapping Up

Then we do some review and summary. I usually do this on paper, but some of these review activities could be integrated within the unit as stations or activities to break up each section if you are looking for a change from the hands-on. I have this activity where students look at different pictures of weathering, erosion, or deposition, and have to identify which it is. After that, they then have to identify what type of weathering, or what the agent of erosion was.

I also have the students do an activity where they create a concept map of pictures and terms of weathering, erosion, and deposition. This can also, of course, be done with just one of these topics. This is a great way for students to think through the processes, and also for you to really better understand their thinking.

This is also a good time to have students practice with vocabulary, through either Quizlet, matching terms and definitions, or doing any number of other vocabulary activities.

Sometimes, depending upon the group, I like to have a summative assessment where they are given a situation (an erosional feature, or photos of Cleopatra’s Needle, or cemetery photos and having them explain what they see, in terms of weathering and erosion.

What can you add?  How do you teach like to teach Weathering and Erosion?  

If you are looking for all of my resources together, click here to check them out. 

How to grade differentiated assignments

Whenever there is discussion of differentiation, or creating and using differentiated assignments, one of the biggest struggles that comes to my mind, and I think for many other teachers, is how to grade those assignments fairly (and hopefully without creating excessive work for the teacher).

It can be overwhelming to think about how to grade all these different assignments or how to make sure that students are fairly evaluated when they're given different assignments here are a few ideas:

First of all, keep in mind that in some cases differentiation is simply another way to learn the content, or practice with the content, and that it does not need to be graded separately. It is a different way to arrive at the same goal and only feedback or formative assessment may need to be given.

If you do decide to grade the differentiated assignment, here are a few suggestions:

1. You could create a checklist and then simply add or subtract a few items on that list from the differentiated assignment.
2. Create a rubric so that whichever format of an assignment students are doing they need to meet the same general criteria but they might meet it in different ways.  The rubric should be focused on the content and the goals of the assignment, not the format.  Here is an example of that. Along with rubrics, here is a more in-depth discussion of something called the “slide rubric” which allows students to show growth, and to show more differences between levels on the rubric. It would take a bit of work to set up, but be easy to score when finished. 
3. The differentiation may be scaffolding that is provided within the assignment, in order to reach the same goal. So, it may not be visible in the final grading.  The final assignment that is turned in may be the same, but it may have some scaffolding built in. 
4. If it's a small assignment, you might want to consider giving a check, or a completion grade for partially complete, incomplete, or not done scale, given whatever their assignment directions were.
5. Assessment could also focus on progress monitoring, such as showing growth, depending upon the needs of your classroom.  I think elementary classrooms do a much better job at this than secondary.  We have a lot to learn from them!! 

As you are thinking about this, remember that 

Grading should ultimately reflect the standards so you're grading should come back to what are the key points that students need to know did they demonstrate their understanding?? Maybe they demonstrated them in different ways but if they sufficiently demonstrated that they know the material that should be the focus of their grading. In other words, the grading is tied to the content of the project, not the format of the project. This is discussed further in this webpage (a very thorough look at differentiation, with a discussion of grading).

If you are using technology, Google Classroom has great options for differentiation as well, that you should be aware of! This article doesn’t specifically address grading, although it touches on it, but it is a great description of using Google Classroom to differentiate, and may give you some great ideas!

As far as a more theoretical perspective, here is a great slideshow from Carol Tomlinson (Differentiation Guru) on grading. She outlines 6 principles on grading that absolutely apply to grading differentiated work as well, and help put things in perspective.

How have you differentiated and graded those differentiated assignments in your classroom? I would love if you would share your experience and your ideas with us either in the comments here, or in our Facebook group.

Help Your Students Struggling with Vocabulary

My Students Know the Content -- Why Do They Test So Poorly?

You may have been taught and prepared to teach your students the content. You have spent time doing that, and you think they understand. Then you give them standardized test questions and they bomb, they shut down, or they keep calling you over very confused. How can this be? You thought you taught them this information?

Sometimes it's not the content words that students are struggling with, but instead it's the non-content vocabulary or the Tier 2 vocabulary. In other words, they know the content but they don't understand the questions or they don't understand the reading passage. If they don't really understand what they are being asked, they can't begin to answer the question.

So many of our students don't have the background knowledge and vocabulary, they may be ELL students or they may just not have a lot of academic vocabulary.

So what can we do about this? 

We need to teach our students this vocabulary! And to successfully teach vocabulary students need practice with those words in several different ways. Of course, this seem like an overwhelming task try to bring our students up to grade level with their vocabulary during science class or another content class but it doesn't have to be as difficult as it sounds. I have written about this before, but I was asked for more specifics on how I implement that strategies and vocabulary that I use.

Here is what I have done

Here is what I did to work on tackling that problem and I'm hoping it will help you too. I went through our last couple years of State exams as well as a few other resources and I compiled a list of Tier 2 vocabulary words. I also asked my students, as we did practice questions throughout the year, what words they didn't know or were confusing and added to the list. I also shared resources with a few other teachers. At that point I had a very good list of words.

I use those first for warm ups. Here are the basic steps that I follow:

• I took a word a day, usually, and I gave them a sentence or a picture to infer, or comparison to another word. 
• Then I had them try to conceptualize and infer what they thought the definition of the word was. 

I would usually project these on the board, and have students record their answers. This could, of course, be done in a Google Form, slide, on paper, or many other formats that fit with your classroom routines. This did two things at once: (1) they got to practice the skill of inferencing and using context clues to figure out the meaning of a word that they didn't know, (2) they also started to get familiar with some of these words.

I would usually do one word a day so five words a week and then after the end of the week or at the end of 2 weeks we would have a little quiz on those words. Sometimes it would just be a matching quiz, sometimes question that had one of those or a reading passage that had one of those words so they could see it in context.

After awhile, it was amazing, students started to learn some of the words but more importantly they started to gain confidence. When we do test questions where they would run across those words I would start to hear things like “Oh, I know this word!” “This is a word we just did last week.” They were not longer foreign, but were familiar instead. Even if they didn’t remember all the definitions, the vocabulary had lost its power to be scary!

What's the Next Step

It's so important that these are integrated in throughout the year and the students practice using them so that it's not an isolated thing. To facilitate this, when we did stations for other topics (I do a lot of stations in my classroom) I usually throw in one extra station to focus on those vocabulary words. It might be the same thing as what is on the board, as a review, but a few task cards printed out. It could be matching up words and definitions either on paper or on Quizlet. Sometimes the station would focus on vocabulary more subtly because it would ask them to write a test question using some of those words (maybe with a word bank or sentence stems). It's so important that they see these over and over again so that they lose their fear and mystery.

Where Can I Find Out More

More strategies are outlined in this great article 8 Steps to Tier 2 Academic Vocabulary in Your Students and here Enriching Academic Vocabulary: Strategies for Teaching Tier Two Words to E.L.L. Students.

This is something that you could easily implement on your own but if you would like to make it easy, my complete set of over 200 words (more than enough to use one every day) they're available here

Here are a few of the pieces of feedback I have gotten on this resource.  I hope it can be helpful to you as well!

I also wrote more about this strategy in these other posts, here, here, here, here, and here.