What's new around Room 16

It's been a while since I posted any pictures of my classroom and the hallway outside, so I thought I'd do a quick update. I recently asked our school director about the possibility of some extra bulletin (notice) boards for the hallway outside my classroom and one more for inside. He said yes, and they were installed a couple of weeks ago. It took quite a bit of time to move material around, freeing up one board for the Khmer classes that meet across the hallway from my classroom to use if they desire. If they don't use it, I will no doubt find a way to fill it up again. Meanwhile, here's a glimpse of the bulletin boards for Grade 4K.

This board is at the front of the classroom,

right beside the whiteboard that is the main focus of teaching,

and where I also project onto, making PowerPoint presentations interactive.

Our IPC units require various resources and student thinking to be displayed.
That's what this board is for.

This is a the other end of the room, and changes regularly.
As the year progresses, I plan to include more Khmer language on this board,
to help increase the children's vocabulary in both languages.

This board is next to the door and holds classroom management material
as well as our IPC Personal Goal material

This photo is the hallway outside my classroom.
As you can see I've now got three bulletin boards
on which to display important information about what we're learning as well as student work.
Board 3 is waiting for student book reports which are almost finished.
I hope to have those displayed before parent-teacher conferences this week.

This is first of the two boards together.
The focus of this board will be what we are learning about.

These cute posters were created during the first week of school
using some foam dolls I picked up at KMart when I was home.
The students loved making these.

First major writing task of the year are our "All About Me" posters.
This was also opportunity to teach students about writing Personal Narratives.
The smiley faces cover photos of the students!

This year we have an improved system in place to follow-up students who are absent. It requires teachers to complete a slip and put it on the door outside our classroom to be collected by one of the guards/drivers during the first part of the morning. I got tired of sticky-taping the note to the door, and then finding sticky tape left on the door, so I asked our maintenance man to screw this cute little character to my door. I was given four of these some years ago, but I hadn't really used them very much. Now I'm really happy to report that, although the first one was broken when they tried to use an electric drill to screw it up, I had another one AND an ordinary screwdriver. Now this cutie is happily doing the job. No more sticky tape!

Challenges and creativity in science teaching

One of the challenges of teaching in a developing country is that you can't just walk down the street to the local School Supply store and pick up the equipment you need for a science experiment. Well, maybe in some developing countries you can, but definitely not here in Cambodia. So that means you have to get a little creative, visit a few (or sometimes many) different stores, and try out some more unusual options. It also means you have to think ahead a bit.

This coming week I've got an experiment to complete that is part of our International Primary Curriculum (IPC) unit called "Investigators". We've almost finished our Investigator Training, and we are currently investigating an accident scene involving a victim with blistered lips! This particular experiment requires students to determine the heat insulation properties of various different types of cups. Just collecting the suggested types of cups was the first challenge.

The experiment called for four types of cup: plastic, paper, polystyrene, and metal. Now plastic is easy, and so is paper. Metal reminded me of the metal cups we used in the dining room when I was at boarding school back in 1980. Then I saw some photos of those multi-coloured aluminium picnic cups that most families seemed to have when I was growing up. A photo on Google reminded me of my old enamel camping mugs, great for keeping a cup of herb tea hot on a cold night! My colleague did some hunting around town for metal cups with little success, so I did some hunting of my own. I eventually found some small stainless steel mugs like this one.

Now you might think finding polystyrene cups would be easy to find, especially in a country where so much street food and take-away food is packaged in polystyrene. Alas, that was not the story. I eventually found them in a grocery store that caters for foreigners, which also carries quite a lot of Australian products! They even had them in three different sizes. Bonus!

So now I've got all my cups lined up, the next challenge is how to measure insulative property. The suggested procedure is to pour hot water into each of the cups and measure the temperature over time, so see which cup keeps the water hot for the longest time. That would require a laboratory thermometer, of which we have none. My colleague thought he had solved the problem when he bought some clinical thermometers, and some clever person suggested putting each cup into cool water, and monitoring the temperature of that cooler water, to see how much it heated up. He tried it this week, and it sort of worked, but the narrow temperature range was something of a problem. I am also hesitant to use them as they look very suspiciously like they are a mercury thermometer, and I don't want the responsibility of mercury in my classroom.

After having hearing his experience, I thought about using standard weather thermometers. While their range isn't a wide as a laboratory thermometer, it does go from -40°C to +50°C, and the ones that I bought cost me all of $1.80 each. I just did my own mini-experiment to see if they would measure water temperature and here are the results.

The thermometer on the left is in refrigerated water (about 8z°C). The one on the right is in tap water (about 28°C). It was very satisfying to see the temperature drop rapidly when I put it in the iced water. Yes, I think that this just might work, especially using the water bath method suggested to us. Both thermometers are exactly the same, so I'm thinking that the different camera angles is why it's harder to read the one on the right than the one on the left.

We'll see how it goes next week, but I'd say that's another successful modification to a project in order to use materials I can actually get my hands on!

Science Fun

In Grade 4K at EWIS, as part of our IPC Investigators unit, we are busy learning how to investigate a crime! Well, actually we are learning lots of science skills that we will use to help us investigate an imaginary crime. Along the way we are having some fun doing experiments.

One of the experiments we have done required the teacher to track down absorbent paper (coffee filter papers work very well) and black water-based markers. Finding water-based markets was a bit more of a challenge, but I managed to track down several different brands and had some fun testing them out (in between uni work).

Earlier this week we completed the experiment and then I made the students write it up as a formal report. Their report writing skills are still a work in progress, but some of them did a great job. Most of them still need to work on adding details and making sure they include all the steps. Tonight, so that everyone can included a picture of the results I've been scanning the absorbent paper. It's very interesting to see how the same process can sometimes yield different results, and I thought I'd share them.

AIHAO Brand

Faber-Castell Jumbo Connector Marker

Pentel Marker

All student worked from the same instructions and supposedly followed the same process but as you can see the results are somewhat different. Very interesting. Maybe the size of the dot had an impact? I'm not sure, but meanwhile I'm thinking students will be happy to have pictures to add to their reports, at least I hope they will. Got to love being able scan stuff like this.

A successful outing

Today I had a successful day. Nothing big was achieved, although it was a fairly good day at school. The success came in the form of a shopping trip.

Our current IPC unit has an extensive list of resources needed, one of which is PH testing strips. When I was at school I'm fairly sure we called it litmus paper. There were a few alternatives, but they are quite complex, so if I could find what I needed it would be good.
Not having easy access to a science teaching supply store, I thought that a medical supply store might just have what we needed. So, this afternoon, I headed out on my trusty moto to the area known to some of us as "pharmacy corner". Yes, there are literally dozens of pharmacies and medical equipment stores all located on the same couple of city blocks. I tried a couple of smaller places without success (no doubt hampered by my lack of Khmer language) and then a bigger pharmacy. Still no luck, so I headed down the street a couple of stores and walked into a place with a name that seemed to have good potential. A young man opened the door for me and offered to help, but litmus paper just wasn't working. When I talked about testing acid and alkaline, another young man behind the counter seemed to know exactly what I was looking for, and told the first young man where to find it.

Hooray! It seems like a small thing, but finding this will make our unit of inquiry that much more interesting for the students and definitely simpler for the teachers. Yes, that's what I'd call a successful outing!