Lesson 7 The Streak Test

Today's lesson went very well.  Kelly and I are becoming more and more organized and prepared every week.  We set everything up and we actually had time to sit down and just review what we were doing for the lesson.  This lesson we were supposed to incorporate technology into our lesson, but we did not need an overhead or anything for this lesson.  We have used the overhead in the previous lessons, but we want to try and incorporate some sort of technology again before the semester is over.  We first asked the students what we did last week and asked them the important question to see what they remember and they all raised their hands to say all minerals are different (colors, shapes, sizes and textures, etc.)  This made us very happy because we are actually teaching these students important facts about rocks and minerals and they are doing very well.  We then passed the minerals out and had the students sort them by color.  We then told them that they just sorted the minerals using their observable color and told them the observable color is what we see with our eyes.  

We then told them scientists use a streak test to find the identifying color of a mineral, whcih is the powered form.  We gave them black and white tile plates and showed how to do mineral A.  We wrote questions on the board to have them think about throughout the whole lesson.  We forgot to tell them these questions before they started the streak test, so we used our teachers handy dandy heart bell to get their attention.  We were then able to tell them the questions, which were written on the board and then they continued with the lesson.  They seemed to have a blast doing the streak test and were so eager to show us what color the minerals came out on the tile plate.  They seemed to do the experiment pretty quickly so if they were done, we had them read about hematite and graphite or discuss with their partners if they found their observable colors to be different from their identifying colors.  We also gave students with IEPs a checklist to use, which they all used.  :) We cleaned up and picked a helper to collect the hand lens. 

Since our reflections were a success last week and the other objection was writing in science, we thought we would have them write another reflection on what they learned. The students seemed to love this and all were so eager to share theirs with the class.  The students all had the cutest reflections and one student said she had so much fun this week and cannot wait until next week.  That really made us happy and made me appreciate and enjoy this awesome experience even more. :) We had a great time as well and I cannot believe we only have two more lessons left.  The semester is going by too fast.