05 summer - kim, dana, katie b
burning cheetos

At this meeting, we started fleshing out how we wanted to use the Living By Chemistry lesson about finding calories in a cheeto via calorimetry. In the spring, we were exposed to this curriculum, and decided that this would fit more into each of our school curriculums better than our original plan of teaching Hess’s Law. At this point, Kim was already teaching and knew where in her courses this would fit. Dana was not in attendance at this meeting, but she also was already teaching and could fit calorimetry into her classes. Kate was getting ready to start her first year of teaching, and knew that this lesson would fit into an integrated chemistry physics class she was preparing.

The attached file shows our planning process of how the specific calorimetry lesson would fit into a greater unit plan. To us, this unit plan was very important, because it helped us anchor our learning goals and how the entire unit was going to work internally and how it would relate to other content. Nicole gave us an outline to organize this thought process.

One of the goals at this meeting for fellows was to discuss probing questions. For each of our unit “days”, we developed several probing questions that we would use in our classrooms to lead discussions, and later we incorporated these into formative and summative assessments for this lesson. Looking back at these questions, they are specifically related to what our learning goals were, even though at this point we might not have been able to word these goals as succinctly as necessary.

documents and resources

• lesson plan - updated cheeto lesson information

(c) 2009 ronnster/oharanator productions