This was the first time I tried this activity, and I was really happy with how well it worked in the classroom. Students were engaged and worked as a team to complete each challenge. Due to time, most groups did not complete all 6 of the tasks, but that wasn’t my goal. Collaboration, Communication, and Perseverance were my objectives.
Day 6 – Nature of Science (Tangrams Activity) (link) & Intro to “I am a scientist” (blog link)
This was the first time I used this activity and it lead to a nice discussion about learning new things, being challenged, and persevering and how somethings seem really hard at first, but then once you master it, it becomes easier.
This was an updated version of an activity that I have done each year, and it was much more engaging for the students, they enjoyed the challenge of finding the broken rules. This also reinforced their reading comprehension, being able to use clues from the text, evaluating text, summarizing the safety rules into 2-3 words only, to name a few.
Some pictures from my 6th grade classroom:
Working as a team to complete a taskCup Stacking Challenge – Challenge #4Cup Stacking Challenge – trying to pick up a cup that fell over without using your handsTangram Challenge – How can we fit in the extra piece?SpongeBob Safety Scenarios – finding the safety violations, identifying the rules, and summarizing them into 2-3 words – can you find all of them?
one laminated set per group (4 slides per page pdf)
2 sided handout for each student to keep in notes (9 slides per page pdf)
Pencils and highlighters
Task Cards for all 16 safety rules
Procedures Part 1:
Prior to the students starting the activity on their own, I read the scenarios out loud for the class. As I read the text, students independently made a light pencil mark in each paragraph to indicate broken safety rules – anything that they thought might be an infraction. After I read the story, they worked with their partner to find the broken safety rules using the task cards. After a few minutes, I modeled the first broken safety rule to make sure everyone was on the right track and understood the directions.
Each student will have a handout with all 5 of the scenarios.
Each group will have one set of safety rule task cards.
Groups will need to identify the safety rules that were not followed for Scenario #1 and pull the safety rule task cards related to Scenario #1. The rules that were not broken will be placed in a pile to the side.
Students will lightly underline where the rules weren’t followed in their notes and write the number of the rule for each violation along with a brief 2-3 word description of the rule that was broken in the margin of their notes.
Once they have found and identified all the safety violations for Scenario 1, they will do the same for Scenarios #2-5.
Students will find as many of the 18 violations as they can.
I don’t tell the students how many safety violations there are, then they can use process of elimination for the last scenario, I tell them that each safety rule task card will be used at least once so they know that there are at least 16 violations to find.
There are 5 Scenario Cards.
Procedures Part 2:
Once the groups have completed the 5 scenarios, they will share their findings with the class.
On the ppt, advance to Scenario 1.
Ask one group to start – What was the first safety violation in this scenario? Which rule did SpongBob’s crew break?
Advance the slide and the answer will be highlighted in either yellow or green font (see image below).
The number in parenthesis is the safety rule number.
All students will use a highlighter to highlight the phrase and make corrections if needed.
Ask the next group if there are any other violations in the scenario, if so, what is the next one?
Each group will contribute an answer until all of them have been identified for Scenario 1.
Do the same for scenarios 2-5.
Discuss your results/debrief.
Each scenario card will reveal the answers, one at a time, and the safety rules that were not followed. The number of the rule is in parenthesis and will match the safety rule task cards.
Additional Resources for this activity:
The original worksheet for this activity is from ScienceSpot.net (pdf)
Interactive Notebook version of this worksheet (pdf)
Marcia has some nice additional activities for Safety on her website (link)
This ppt was modified from the original source found at (link)
SpongeBob SquarePants® and all related characters are trademarks of Viacom International Inc.
For more lessons on Science Skills, click on this page (link)
Practice Punnett Squares with SpongeBob & the Gang
If you have a unit on genetics, this is a must have as part of your lesson plans. The worksheets were created by Tracy and posted on her website, ScienceSpot.net (link). I created a Google Slides presentation for my 7th graders to help them set up, solve, and analyze Punnett squares.
As a class, we worked on the first few problems together. Then, students worked with a partner and self checked their work using the ppt slides. For homework, they were to finish the problems and self check using the ppt slides. In class the next day, we reviewed some of the problems to check for understanding.
Middle School Science Blog 