A great way to introduce yourself to new classes! Read the poem, "What's in the Sack?" by Shel Silverstein to your students. Have a big sack in front of you while you read it. The kids are already wondering what's in your sack! Then have a student come up and with eyes closed, pick one item out of the sack. They sit down again and you tell your students what this item tells them about you. Have different students bring out 4 or 5 more items in the sack that tell them what's important to you. Make sure you include something that indicates how important to you your students are, such as last year's yearbook or snapshots of last years kids or a video of a good lab that you can quickly pop in the VCR and show them what fun you had last year. Then on the back of your Student Inventory Worksheet, have them draw inside a sketch of a sack 4 - 6 things that tell you about them. For younger students, you could have them bring in the actual objects and share a few each week. Thanks to Janet Enloe for this great idea!

Six or seven teams work great. Run a team competition for about two weeks, then give prizes to the winning team and start over with new teams. These teams can compete in such games as "Show me the Mineral" or White Board Review Competitions. Merge teams into two bigger teams for Overhead Races where only two teams work. Give both teams a problem to solve or a definition to write. Each team writes on one half of a transparency. (It's okay to "peek" at the other team's answers, but it slows them down. Each team member writes only one word or number, then hands off the marker to the next in line. Teams line up on either side of the overhead. Great fun! Gets students up and moving!

This is a basic Active Learning activity in my classroom. We have white boards, cut out of one larger one bought at a local hardware store. I train my students early on to move into four teams, send one team member to pick up the white board, marker, and eraser, and assemble in one area, placing the white board so they can work on it without other teams seeing their answers. They are careful to wait for me to count down and say, "Show me your answer!" so as to not tip off another team to their answer. I run White Board Games frequently, at least twice a week. Works great for the 13-15 year old bunch! I love to see their heads together, working out good answers.

Click here for my BELLWORK Page. Teachers call this by different names: starters, bells, bellringers, etc. Good way to focus student attention and give you time to take roll. I usually put up a couple of questions from our current unit. Another great source is the back of a chapter, where good thinking questions reside. Sometimes I put up a graph, chart, table, from Julia Cothron's book, or the textbook, and ask students to list as many observations and/or conclusions as they can.

Give student pairs a blank "Bingo" card. Have them write the names of various scientific equipment you've reviewed/taught. Then hold up actual samples of scientific equipment or transparency images of the equipment. They sketch the item in the correct box to match name to item. "Bingo" for column, row, or diagonal. This can be any type of Bingo, actually. I've used Mineral Bingo, Rock Cycle Bingo, etc. Of course, can be used anytime during the class period.

Rather than passing papers to the front, train students to pass to the left or right. It's even slicker to have papers put on the top corner of the next desk or table, rather than passed to the next person' hands. I train my students to wait till all papers have them passed to their table before they pass them on. They put their paper on the top. All the papers end up on one desk near the side when you can easily collect them. Works great--especially when the student on the end of the row has their paper on the top. Very easy to pass papers back. Just hand the stack to the person on the end of the row!