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Since the paper was a few pages, I have kept the document as a Word document. So if you click here,[Best Practice Paper], you will get a copy. The actual activities are highlighted below.
For the chapter on Gases, I have the students work in groups. There are 3 Gas law and Avogadro's Hypothesis. For each of the four concepts, there are a set of demonstrations, reading in the book and an animated website to help them figure out the relationship (including mathematical equations) between the two gas parameters (T, V, P, n). The four webpages are:
For organizational purposes, I also have two handouts where the students write all their results (relationship between parameters, math equation). GasLaws is for students that like English more since it more a document and [Gas Laws Worksheet] is for more math students since it is in Table format.
Following coming up with the math equation, there are problems to complete. So, I have given them some directions, Steps to Calculate Gas Problems on how to solve these gas problems if they have not already come up with their own procedure.
Here are the math problem webpage (they do them in their groups together)
The review is a game of team questions/problem. Most correct answer get candy (school allows it). They play the game several times by this time of school year (no directions written down).
This is not an inquiry approach but it is different from current teaching methods. With the current technology, I believe that the classroom time should be used for problem solving (homework) and labs/demos. I am starting to put some of my lectures on the Internet for students to review at home which frees up classroom time for more labs and other hands on activities. I will give one of my few trials:
It will require you to have three different windows open at once (I am going to explain if you were going to do but you don't have to actually do it)
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