Its day 3 of full class. I'm ready to get into the material. We've spent a lot of time covering things like the syllabus, lab safety, and how to access materials on Google Drive, as well as trying to learn as many of the 138 names as I can. Even though it is sometimes painful to spend time going over such basics, I know that without the time spent on it, the students will soon feel quite lost. By the end of today I have realized one thing that the students are still confused on, despite going over it several times: Homework.
This year, we are giving the students two options to do their homework: they can either read the book and take notes on their reading, or they can finish their daily activity sheet and add a reflection to it. Almost every day, the students use an activity to learn the material. Usually, we don't get through all the questions on the sheet in class, so they are able to finish it and write a short reflection to fulfill their homework requirement. The key is that they learn the material. There is no point in doing extra problems or work if they have already learned it. By having to write a reflection, they will be unable to copy "answers" and they will easily be showing whether or not they truly understand the concepts covered. Click here to see the Reflection template we created. The "Making Sense" question is a reference to the activity sheet. Eventually, I think we'll progress to having them submit the reflection through Google Classroom, which was just released by Google.
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