Tag Archives: science literacy

A Lesson Plan on the Decibel Scale from The Order of Things

This lesson plan on the decibel scale and its accompanying reading and comprehension worksheet are another of the 50 lessons I have prepared using text from Barbara Ann Kipfer’s The Order of Things. If you have students interested in audio engineering or music production, this is something for them.

Otherwise, this is a simple literacy lesson that calls upon students to work with numbers and words in one document. I’ve been working on both the unit plan for these lessons and a user’s manual for their documents. I struggle to articulate why I developed these lessons and how I would use them. For now, think of the documents above as a rehearsal for word problems in math–one of the things that so often bedevil emergent and struggling readers.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Write It Right: Avoirdupois for Weight

Avoirdupois for Weight. Mere slang.”

Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.

Word Root Exercise: Bar/o

This  worksheet on the Greek word root bar/o yields in English, as Greek roots tend to, a number of words related to the physical sciences. In this case, bar/o means pressure and weight. You find it at the base of weather-related words like barometer and millibar.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

By posting this reading on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet that it is appropriate for high-schoolers (it might be, for the right ones), or of particularly high interest (again, it might be, for the right one) or demand. I actually wrote this for one student who was very interested in philosophy, but not otherwise interested in school.

Anyway, any reading on Liebniz can complement a calculus class, particularly if you want students to know something about the history of the field. More broadly, if you are conducting inquiry into the Enlightenment, or teaching Voltaire’s Candide, this material will provide some context for that novella.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

A Lesson Plan on Data Storage from The Order of Things

As you get older, you take it for granted, but it’s still fun to experience synchrony. A friend of mine and I land on synchrony quite often while texting–often using the same words simultaneously. In this case, the same day I interviewed with some very nice, clearly talented, unusually engaged and deeply committed folks at a computer-themed career and technical education high school in the North Bronx, I pulled out this lesson plan on data storage, adapted from text I grabbed from Barbara Ann Kipfer’s The Order of Things. I expect this would work well at a school such as theirs. I hope they find their way to it.

For your students, here is the list as reading and comprehension questions, which is the work of this lesson.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

E.O. Wilson on the Importance of Insects and the Relative Unimportance of Humankind

“If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed then thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”

Edward O. Wilson

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.

Mendelian Genetics

In general, I don’t teach science. But I’ve spent sufficient time in the company of the discipline, especially that middle-school and high-school level, that I know this reading on Mendelian genetics and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet are the foundations of a broader inquiry into genetics.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Word Root Exercise: Cerebro

OK, moving right along this morning, here is a worksheet on the Latin word root cerebro. It means, I expect you’ve gathered by now, brain. Most of the words that grow from this root–it’s very productive in English–denote brain but also connote mind and intellect. But again, you probably already know that.

Like many Greek roots on this blog, this Latin root will be useful, indeed necessary, for students interested in the healthcare professions.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Raptor (n)

From my current perch, waiting out the pandemic in Southwestern Vermont, time and place dictate that I post this context clues worksheet on the noun raptor. I can’t remember why I wrote this, but I have to assume it was the Word of the Day at Merriam-Webster.

It means “bird of prey.” Students might connect it with that feared creature of the Jurassic Park movie franchise, the velociraptor. Also, now you know what you’ll see if you visit the Raptor Center at the Vermont Institute of Natural Science over in Quechee.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Term of Art: Schema

“Schema: A plan, diagram, or outline, especially a mental representation of some aspect of experience, based on prior experience and memory, structured in such a way as to facilitate (and sometimes to distort) perception, cognition, the drawing of inferences, or the interpretation of new information in terms of existing knowledge. The term was first used in a psychological sense by the English neurologist Sir Henry Head (1861-1940), who restricted its meaning to a person’s internal body image, and it was given its modern meaning by the English psychologist Sir Frederic Charles Bartlett (1886-1969) in his book Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology [1932, p. 199] to account for the observation that errors in the recall of stories tend to make them more conventional, which Bartlett attributed to the assimilation of the stories to a pre-existing schemata. The concept of a frame, introduced in 1975 by the US cognitive scientist Marvin (Lee) Minsky (1927-2016), is essentially a schema formalized in artificial intelligence. A script is a schema of an event sequence.”

[From Greek schema a form, from echein to have]”

Excerpted from: Colman, Andrew M., ed. Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003