Week 8

This week was the first week that I was able to teach continuously, unfortunately I only cover 4/5 days, because that Chemistry Unit Test was pushed back for more review time. On the bright side, I did get to teach Physics. Since I was only teaching physics for the first 4 days of the new unit, I did not create a unit plan, as I was not there to follow it through. My associate teacher did tell me that each unit should be approximately 4.5 weeks, which I thought was interesting and made the most sense. By having each unit be 4.5 weeks long, it gives you enough time to cover all the material, and time to work on the culminating assignment and final exam exam review at the end of January.

When I taught my lessons, I made sure that there was an activity to do every day, something that they could see for themselves. On the first day we discussed what light is, what the electromagnetic spectrum is, and what is visible light. To support the visible light topic, we watched a clip from Bill Nye the Science Guy, where he explains colour, and the visible spectrum. The activity that supported this lesson was students looking through the spectroscope, and diffraction glass, and answer some questions. The next day we discussed different light source and had examples to support each source. On the third day, we started to talk about reflection, the different types of reflection, and how light can be transmitted or absorbed. For this activity I got the student to do two things. The first was to look at incident angles and reflected angle, little to their knowledge they were discovering the Laws of Reflection (which was discussed at the beginning on the next class). The other part was to look at a mirror and notice the image (the images are reversed). This was the leading activity for the next day's topic. So when it came to Friday, there was no activity, since the activity was on the previous day. However, we talked about the activity and hopefully the students were able to see the connection. Unfortunately, I did not get the time to teach the student concave, and convex mirrors, or lens.

I was disappointed that I had to leave (and I feel as if some of the students where disappointed as well). However, at the same time I am happy to be back at Queen's. Now that I have a practicum under my belt, I see what I want to learn and not what I think I should learn. For example, one thing that I hope to learn is more activities that I can do with my students when I return (especially since I will be teaching Biology to the grade 10's). However, I do not want to be focusing on the grade 9 and 10 curriculum, I would also love to know of some activities I can do with the grade 12 (who will either be study Fields or The Wave Natures of Light).

I am very excited to see what the next 5 weeks have in store!