I teach in a rural school district in Ohio and have what I believe are the best students a teacher could ask for. They are genuinely good kids who work hard and want to do their best. I have the privilege of teaching fourth, fifth and sixth grade science.
My students love doing hands-on projects and labs that bring science to life in front of their eyes.
For many of my students, science is one of their favorite classes and I work hard to make it engaging and fun. I want students to leave my classroom with an excitement and passion to learn about the world around them.
My Project
One of my students' favorite parts of science class is doing hands-on labs and demonstrations. Many of these labs require them to find the mass of various things. We learn what mass is and practice finding it. We use mass when we learn about density and we also measure the mass of many materials in labs on a variety of science topics. At present, I only have one electronic balance that all the students have to share during lab. This obviously makes labs run very inefficiently as there is a lot of time wasted waiting for their turn to use the balance. Many times in order to make this work, one student has to bring the material to the supply table where I keep the balance, find the mass and report back to their lab group. This means that in the course of a lab, only a few students actually get the hands-on experience of using the balance.
These balances will give more students the chance to have the hands-on experience of measuring mass.
With these balances, I will have enough for each lab group to have their own balance. This will help our labs to run much more smoothly and efficiently and will help keep all group members engaged.
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