Category: Science

Grade 6 Science of Circus (Physics) Lesson Plans

11/19/2015

I've had an incredible experience this semester with my Science class. I've developed a full physics unit on Newton's Laws of Motion, using Circus activities to hook, demonstrate and integrate the concepts. I can't wait to teach them!! I now have an integrated 10 lesson unit plan that is fun, engaging, active, and adaptable to younger or older grades. Most importantly, I LOVE what I'm learning!!

The Science of Circus

I now have the following Physics lesson plans in my teaching arsenal:

Juggling Gravity
Keeping it in Balance: Centre of Gravity
Walking the Line: Balance
What goes around comes around: Angular Momentum
Jump Around: Potential, Kinetic, and Elastic Energy
Slinky Physics: Energy Transfer
Having a Ball with Newton’s First Law
Swinging To and Fro: Pendulum Motion
Falling with Style- Gravity, Friction, Air Resistance
What’s that Sound? Sound Waves/ Doppler Effect/ Sound Barrier

I've posted the first lesson plan, Juggling Gravity, on my educational Blog. The rest are available to teachers and education students by request. Contact me for more details!

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Juggling Gravity

11/19/2015

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Juggling Gravity

Lesson Plan (adaptable)
Teacher: Mz.K
Date: 07/Nov/2015
Overview & Purpose
Juggling has always fascinated me.
After the challenge of learning to keep three balls in the air I wanted to do whatever I could to be a better juggler. In doing so I discovered how mathematics and physics applied to the juggling techniques I was learning. The goal of this lesson is to use juggling to illustrate some basic principles of Gravity to students, then provide a context for discussion afterwards.
BC Education Standards (Grade 6)
Core Competencies:

Communication
Thinking
Personal/Social

Big Ideas:

Newton’s three laws of motion describe the relationship between force and motion.
Balanced and Unbalanced Forces
Force of Gravity

Curricular Competencies

Questioning and Predicting
Planning and Conducting
Processing and Analyzing data and information
Evaluating
Applying and Innovating
Communicating

LEARNING INTENTION/HOOK

I have a basic understanding of the force of Gravity
I know what a parabola is and can draw one.
I can practice my juggling skills.

Materials Needed

Juggling balls
Handouts

Classroom Lecture (5 mins)

“What goes up must come down…”

Gravity is the force that pulls everything back down to earth. Gravity also keeps the moon going around the earth and the earth going around the sun. Luckily for jugglers (and rocket scientists), the force is always the same and predictable.
In simple terms, this means that if you drop an object, it will continue to speed up as it falls. Not only that, it will speed up at the same rate, no matter how big or heavy the object is.
Also, if you throw an object up, it will slow down at the same rate. That means it takes just as much time going up, as does to come back down to where it started.
Of course you hardly ever throw something exactly straight up. Most objects travel through the air going across as well as up and down. The curved path is a shape called a parabola. A common place to see a parabola is the path water takes flowing from a water fountain. The shape of a juggling throw is a parabola.
Draw parabola on the board.
Key terms:

Gravity: the force that attracts a body toward the center of the earth, or toward any other physical body having mass.
Parabola: a symmetrical open plane curve formed by the intersection of a cone with a plane parallel to its side. The path of a projectile under the influence of gravity ideally follows a curve of this shape.

Activity (15 mins)Break out the juggling balls or scarves. Progress and scaffold with the children at their level towards a 3 ball cascade. Remind them to think about the Gravity and other forces that are being exerted on the balls.
Questions to be answered:
What is the difference between a heavier ball and a lighter ball? Do you think they fall at the same or a different rate?
With your partner, define Gravity, and draw a parabola. Design an experiment to test your hypothesis to the above questions. Record your results and share your finding with the class.
Summation (5 mins): Review concepts presented. Facilitate a discussion about their findings.
Verification
Steps to check for student understanding

I understand Gravity and can write the definition down.
I can draw a parabola on my paper.
I can practice my juggling skills.

Sources:
http://www.scienceofjuggling.com/studyguide.html

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Reflections on Science

11/14/2015

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Science has always been a fascinating subject for me, but one that was beyond my reach in my formal schooling. Growing up, we moved frequently. I attended 10 schools over my 12 years, bouncing between two provinces with different curriculums. While I excelled at reading and at anything using my creativity, the repeated moves did not provide continuity or stability for my math education. I did not acquire basic math fluency or number sense. My educational challenges with math growing up always impeded my ability to engage with the sciences. While I found them fascinating, without the basic number sense that I failed to grasp in elementary school the sciences were beyond my reach in high school. I managed to graduate with the minimum requirements for both science (biology 10- the least math based science course) and a 'P' in math- achieved only through a summer school class.
I pursued a degree in social work and worked in the social work field for many years. My degree focused on psychology and counselling, along with advocacy and public policy. Science and Math were not part of my everyday world for many years.
My first positive experience with both science and math was the opportunity to take an introductory astronomy class as an elective for my degree- Elementary Astronomy for Non-science students at UVIC. My professor had crazy mad professor hair and was quirky to say the least. He took a lecture hall full of math phobic Arts degree students and Star Trek fans and toured us through the wonders of the universe, teaching us some basic physics along the way. I also had the support of my husband at the time who was comfortable with math and was able to tutor me with the basic formulas and calculations required. This year long course was the first time that I felt successful with either a science or a math subject and changed my attitude towards these topics from reluctance and failure to excitement and success.
My career path eventually lead me into show business, and I was a full time circus artist for 6 years before beginning to age out of the industry and so took the PBED program. My experience with prop manipulation was purely movement based; it was only in the past 3 years since working with a new performance partner (a math and science major) that I've been learning the math behind the movement. I've even been exploring the math of patterns and movement in my Math Blogs over the past semester. (http://www.vestaeducation.com/viu-education-program/category/mathematics)
My science project was an exciting prospect for me- starting to explore the physics of movement as it relates to circus. This was not simply writing lesson plans about concepts I was already familiar with. This was learning completely new-to-me concepts and adapting lesson plans to include circus based examples and activities. I compiled 9 lesson plans that explain the concepts that apply to circus movement. They are geared for approximately grade 6 level.
The grade 6 curriculum focuses on the laws of motion, and I have taken some liberty to include other topics in surrounding grades such as sound waves. Thankfully, the elementary curricula is focused on learning the concepts and not the math. My lesson plans do not include the math of physics.
I can easily ground my decision to exclude the math in developmental theory. Piaget states that children in grade 6 will not have the capacity to learn symbolic mathematics as they are still in the Concrete Operational stage of thinking. My own experience with high school math and science could be viewed in this lens as well- perhaps my own development was typical in that even without the fundamentals, I was not developmentally ready for the abstract maths when they were presented to me.
Reflection of my motivations shows that I have other more personal reasons for not including math. One, it is not explicitly stated in the curricula that it needs to be included. My underlying motivation is that simply I am still uncomfortable with the subject. However this leaves me with a nagging feeling that the lessons are incomplete. I am
torn between my desire to present a complete lesson and my fear of my own inability to not only understand but to explain the concepts.
This is not an isolated struggle. When we take on the role of 'teacher', we can be tempted to proclaim ourselves as 'experts' on the topics we are teaching.
As generalist practitioners however, we present the entire academic spectrum to the elementary classes. This project crystallizes a struggle that I feel we all have- how to present material to a class that we are unsure of. How do we teach what we do not know?
The answer, of course, is we learn along with our students, and remember that the children we work with may not be ready to learn everything that we have capacity to teach. This project has only introduced me to the laws of motion, and every time I teach this topic my understanding will deepen. I do not have to know everything, and while I will be able to learn more with each experience, I need to remain child centered in my approach. Teachers can take the position of co-learner instead of expert. Like my astronomy teacher from years ago, I can accompany my students on a journey of discovery. I don't need to know all the answers, I just need to model wonder and curiosity about the world around us. We can travel together.

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Patterns: Math is Beautiful

10/18/2015

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Mathematics Blog Post #1
Cohort 2
___
By Karina Strong

Math. For some, the mention of Math Class evokes feelings of panic, inadequacy, and dread. Much has been written on these feelings called Math Anxiety or Math Phobia. I too have had this emotional response for most of my life. This series of 3 blog posts is my exploration in my personal re-framing of my attitude- the evolution from anxiety to wonder.
What is Math?
Math was taught to me in the same manner that most math phobic kids were taught: Timed worksheets, formula memorization, drills, and endless rote memorization. I did not have a solid number sense foundation, or understanding of what math represented. It was a frustrating experience, full of failure.
A few years ago, I was lucky to hire a new employee for my circus business. Kat is not only a talented performer, he is a ‘math guy’. He loves math. Not only because he understands the equations, but because he understands the Language of Math that the equations represent; he can translate the equations into patterns. He would try to explain these patterns to me, and little by little over the course of time my eyes stopped glazing over when he spoke and I began to have an inkling into what he was talking about.
"Mathematics is the study of patterns, and the equations that come from it are merely written shorthand for exploring those patterns, akin to a poem about a sunset being a written reminder to the author of the experience." DrexFactor.com

This concept was revolutionary to both my understanding and my attitude about Math. As a movement artist, I am very interested in patterns- the patterns that we make with our dance, and the patterns of how the performers move on stage. That Math is a symbolic representation of patterns not only explains the reasoning behind it but opens up a new door in appreciation. As Kat has often said to me, “Math is beautiful.” I'm beginning to believe him.

Patterns in Nature
Patterns are everywhere in nature. Human beings are hardwired to recognize patterns; Patterns are beautiful to us. If language is the dawn of humanity, Math and numbers are in the truest sense the symbolic representation of thought. Math is the symbolic language of patterns and therefore of the universe. The language of God, one might say.

“We live in a universe of patterns. The stars move across the sky, the moon changes phase monthly, the seasons cycle at yearly intervals, snowflakes all have sixfold symmetry, animals are covered in stripes and spots, waves move across the desert and the ocean, rainbows float across the sky..” (Stewart p 1)

By using Math to organize our ideas about patterns, we can understand these patterns with greater clarity. The more clarity we have, the more questions we can answer about the science that governs natural processes. There are countless patterns in nature; here are two interesting examples that I have learned about in the course of researching this topic:
Fibonacci Spiral

The Fibonacci Sequence is the series of numbers: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, … The next number is found by adding up the two numbers before it. When we make squares with those widths, we get a specific type of spiral. This Fibonacci spiral is a recurring pattern found often in nature.

Fractals
A fractal is a never-ending pattern. They are created by repeating a simple process over and over. A fractal is a geometric shape that has symmetry of scale. This means that it is a shape that you could zoom in on a part of it an infinite number of times and it would still look the same. This is also called self-similarity. Clouds are good examples of fractal structure in nature.

Pattern Breakers: the shape of Chaos

The simplest mathematical objects are numbers, and the simplest of nature's patterns are numerical. People have two legs, cats have four, insects have six, spiders have eight. A break in this pattern would seem extraordinary, certainly raising the attention of biologists and botanists. The normality of Nature's patterns is ingrained into our culture in many different ways. "Clover normally has three leaves: the superstition that a four leaf clover is lucky reflects a deep-seated belief that exceptions to patterns are special.” (Stewart, 4)

Being able to recognize and, through the application of Math theory, analyze patterns in our world we are also able to notice dissymmetry or breaks in those patterns. While pattern analysis leads to the deepening of understanding about the laws of nature, analysing the pattern breakers leads to innovative creative thinking and results in scientific leaps forward. “Once we have learned to recognize a background pattern, exceptions suddenly stand out. Against the circling background of stars, a small number of stars that move quite differently beg to be singled out for special attention...It took a lot longer to understand the patterns of planetary motion than it did to work out why stars seem to move in nightly circles. But the Planets were clues to the rules behind gravity and motion.” (Stewart, p 3)

Conclusion
The study of math teaches us many things. Math is the symbolic language of patterns, and patterns are the key to our physical world. With math, we try to learn not only how things happen; but WHY they happen. We organize the patterns we observe so we can predict how nature will behave. With this understanding we can make practical use of what we have learned. My own understanding of Mathematics is still very basic, but my grasp of the meta reasoning behind Math theory has expanded. I am beginning to comprehend that Math is not only beautiful, it is the language of science and the key to understanding our world.

Sources:
DrexFactor.com
Wikipedia Fibonacci
Wikipedia Fractal
Stewart, Ian. Natures Numbers. Basic Books 1997
Countless conversations with Kat

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Grade 6 Science of Circus (Physics) Lesson Plans

The Science of Circus

Juggling Gravity

Juggling Gravity

Reflections on Science

Patterns: Math is Beautiful

Karina Strong

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