Jim DeHaan from De La Salle Collegiate high school inquired about open house ideas.
My response is as follows:
How long is the open house?
Depending on the time you can do any number of things.
We have an open house of sorts where the parents do the students’
schedules. They move through a typical school
day but spend only 12 minutes in each
classroom. For this I do a discrepant
event demonstration show. I set up
between 6 and 10 discrepant event demonstrations and have the parents predict
the outcomes before I do the demo for them.
It’s fun and light and I get to show the high energy nature of my classroom. It doesn’t, however, give me time to explain
the things about my classroom like the modeling method or the SBG.
If it is long like 35 or 40 minutes I suggest a structured activity like
the buggy lab or a pendulum lab with white boarding. Both are fun and easy to do with decently
easy to interpret results.
If it is truly an “open house” where people can walk in and out I would
suggest have a couple of hand-on demos that they can do set out. Like the ball under the table, two different
mass pendulums, a popper car on a track, happy and sad balls etc. In addition I would have student work around
the room like white boards for sure and if you do anything else like writing
samples or pictures or projects with kids names on them.
What do you think about that?
The original email is below.
I am looking for ideas for open house. Got anything
that you are willing to share?
Also, I made some new stacks of graphs worksheets (the other
ones were low quality). They are attached.
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1 comment:
I loved using my mystery tubes at my open house. Perfect analogy for science and how we investigate it in my class. Explain to the parents that we can never open the tube. We can only hope we come up with a model that works the same way. Then that model is the truth until we prove it otherwise.
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