Strategies
These lessons involve hands-on and minds-on inquiry activities that have real life connections and relevance for students. The focus is the chemistry of polymers. The goal is to introduce the subject of polymers to students in a fun and engaging way. Students will investigate the basic properties and behavior of polymers, through the lens of synthetic hair fibers. An ecological approach will be employed to teach the unit. As such, the exercises and assignments in the unit will draw from the social and cultural experiences of the students. The encapsulated view of hair, natural and synthetic, as expressed in popular media, will serve to open the discussion on polymer chemistry. In conjunction with the facilitated discussions, students will be guided to survey polymers around them. They will create and test various polymeric materials, including various types of synthetic hair. Using appropriate tools of investigation, students will observe and evaluate the properties of synthetic hair fibers along with other polymeric materials. Additionally, students will construct models that simulate polymer structure to inform their understanding of morphology of synthetic and real hair.
Guided by the California State Standards for Chemistry, students will not only learn essential facts and concepts on polymeric science, but they will also develop an understanding of their material world. The unit is designed to promote collaborative learning, to stimulate students to generate questions in order to consolidate their learning, to reinforce reasoning skills and to support laboratory skills. Daily re-looping of content and inquiry will be an essential process in assisting students to retain and learn material. A variety of pedagogical tools and strategies will be used to facilitate student learning and to assess their understanding. These include explicit teaching, small group guided discussion, laboratory experiments, student and teacher led demonstrations, visualization, oral sharing/board meetings, use of visual aids, including multimedia, and literacy techniques, e.g. Venn Diagram, KWL, vocabulary logs. Each student will maintain an interactive response journal, a daily record of content taught, questions generated, and ideas formulated.
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