Bringing Beach to Classroom

What's the next best thing to taking your class to the beach?  Taking the beach to the classroom!  This week in class we've been learning about mixtures and solutions, how you make them, and how you separate them.  To help the students make a real-world connection to the topic, I designed a laboratory investigation centered around mixtures and solutions that can be found at the beach.  This morning I headed out to the Seawall in front of the Hotel Galvez to collect samples of saltwater, sand, and other good stuff for students to dig into.

Can I start every school day collecting samples at the beach?

The students really enjoyed the investigation and it reinforced their understanding of all the concepts that I taught this week.  There's nothing more fulfilling as a science teacher than to see and hear your students engaged in a laboratory investigation, using new vocabulary words in the correct context, and talking about how they plan to re-create the experiment when they get home.

I learned a lot today too.

1. All beach samples should be checked for live specimens prior to all lab investigations. 
2. Even just 50 mL of saltwater has the potential to be a eye safety hazard and safety goggles should be worn... at least by the 5th grade boys... even though they go to the beach and get in the water all the time without goggles... 
3. It's not a good idea to pour water and salt mixtures down an elementary school classroom sink that was not designed to be a laboratory sink... the custodians are probably not happy with me right now.

But the most important thing that I learned today is that next year it'd be way more cool to take a walking field trip to the beach the day before the investigation so that students can collect the samples themselves.  With this being my first year to teach middle school science, I'm doing well to plan just a week in advance... and even then, sometimes I plan too much and other times I plan too little; sometimes I make concepts too complicated and other times I kept it too simple... and I end up re-planning "tomorrow" every day.  But next year will be different.  Next year I'll take my "good" lessons and I'll make them even better.

And next year I hope that I'll actually get to eat lunch between classes!  I only have thirty minutes between one class leaving and the next one coming to eat lunch and prep the lab for the next class.  I told the girls that they know I love them when I choose setting up their laboratory investigation over eating, because there are very few things in this world that are more important to me at noon than eating!

We've had a lot of visitors- including the superintendent of KIPP Houston, the superintendent of Galveston ISD, school board members, and founding coalition members- to our building over the last several weeks.  Our school leader tells me again and again how they've all had wonderful things to say about my classroom.  I'm proud of how much I've grown and my students have grown over the last six or seven weeks.

KIPP has been an amazing opportunity and I know that teaching here is exactly where God wants me to be.  I hope that He will continue to bless my classroom as a place where my students can come and grow both as a young scientist and as a young person.  They truly are special little people, and I pray that I can be as much of a blessing in their lives as they are in mine!