Lab Safety and Equipment in the ISN

This is the way we organized our curriculum information for lab safety and equipment in our ISNs. Our table of contents was on page 6 and 7 to begin our first six weeks. Upon reflection we will not need two pages for the table of contents so page 7 will be a quick “review as we go” page where students will write important big ideas for their six weeks test.

The next two pages are the beginning of our safety lessons. We handed out a condensed version of our safety rules and had them glue them on page 9. Then I assigned them two rules to depict on a poster. They were not allowed to write the safety rules on their poster. They used page 8 for brainstorming with their group to help them organize their thoughts for their poster. Two days later, when they had completed their posters, we did a silent gallery walk. I gave each student 9 sticky notes. (I have nine lab tables in my room) They numbered the corner of the sticky to correlate to the tables. My tables are numbered 1-9. They then walked around and wrote down the rule they thought was depicted on each poster on the sticky for that table. Then we talked about it. It was a great activity. I am really trying to make my classroom more learner centered rather than teacher centered and I am really surprised at how well it is going.

On the next two pages we glued an activity called Where’s Safe-T. It is a cartoon of a science lab with a grid on top. There are questions that go along with it. Such as, where is a person wafting or who is making an unsafe observation. The students have to find the coordinates for this. You can use this to incorporate graphs. On Page 11 we glued the grid and on page 10 the questions that went with it. I also showed a video from youtube, “Lab gone wrong”. They wrote their reflections about what they saw on page 10 as well. Eventually we took our safety quiz and the students folded in hamburger style so that they could see the title and taped it over their reflections and answers so they could lift the quiz and see the other. The lab gone wrong video is below

we also watched this lab safty video.....it's awesome

Next we started equipment. We decided to introduce this to our students with an explore lab. Since this is information we are not “giving” them we put it on the left side on page 12. We set lab equipment around the room. Students had to rotate around and write down what they thought the name of the piece of equipment could be, what they thought we use it for and draw a picture. The next day we went over their answers and gave them a handout with pictures. See the picture that follows for our set up. This lab was much better than just taking notes on equipment

I will add a picture with the "tools of a scientist" on page 13. Some students needed more than just one page. In this case I told them to continue to page 13 and when we glued their hand out they had to be able to lift up part of it to see their lab below.

We are now ready for our safety and equipment test. The next two pages will contain thier review. I was going to put their review on page 15 and have them make a foldable about the review but we did not get to it.