Well, the plan was to blog every day. The problem is school, kids, lesson plans, meetings, teachers, and technology all got in the way. In other words...life.
I did do my "hook up an electrical outlet" launch. It wasn't as "electrifying" as I would have liked. I should have practiced it more.
Students volunteered to connect a short electrical wire to an outlet. The whole point was to show how scary doing something you've never done before can be. To have any success, you need to look for context clues. You need to use some deduction. You need to make educated guesses. (On the back of each outlet is the word "white" which tells you which color wire to connect to which particular screw. My mnenonic device is "white is not right". Don't connect the white wire to the right side when the outlet is facing you.)
Another day we did a neat exploration with large butcher paper size graph paper. Groups had collected data on individuals who did jumping jacks for 90 seconds. Students recorded their tables and graphs and answered some context questions. Just watching kids who don't normally work together figure out how to best visually show their data and graphs is really interesting. It forces kids to talk and find consensus.
It's good practice for life.
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