It’s obvious that practice tests are helpful for students.  I love using them to reduce anxiety, improve performance, and ensure each student understands the breadth of the material.  But there are some hidden benefits as well.  Practice tests help you, the teacher!  Here is how giving a practice test for each unit benefits teachers by improving instruction, reducing grading, supporting assessment, and saving time. Structure of the practice test I will briefly describe the st

Have you ever done this?  You finally decide to change a lab, and then wonder, why didn’t I do this years ago?  That was me this week.  For years I used batteries and lights to measure the conductivity of solutions.  I used it in my lab exploring the physical properties of ionic and molecular compound.  But I found that the voltage was too low if I used D cell batteries.  And if I used 9 V batteries the kids would burn out all the lights.  It was a constant battle.  Here is h

Teaching the formation of ionic compounds isn’t hard for most.  But starting with a visual activity before ANY lessons have occurred really helped the struggling students this year. The kids were engaged in solving problems using information they had from previous chapters.  Here is how I built the first part of the unit. Make compounds with manipulatives On the first day of the unit, which happened to be the first day back from Christmas break, I handed out decks of Who’s yo

You made it to the last day of finals! Way to go. If you are like me, your red pen will be moving at 1,000 miles per hour after school today to get finished up. I hope that you are looking forward to some time off. Time to breath. Time to reset. Time to stress about what to do with your children at home. Let me see if I can help. I made a Christmas Break Bingo card. Go ahead, limit your children's (and your) screen time. Pick a square and go for it. Looking back on