Density and Tyler Florence

I'm grading papers. It's alright.  My students are terrible spellers. Glucose has been spelled "GLUECOS" about a hundred times. We recently finished a density lab where we had to find the density of 5-20 pennies.  And guess what, the density stays the same!  Surprise kids. 

    But the spelling.  PENNIES turned into PENIS. And since most of the students copy each other's work, I had about 30 papers with penis written all over it. I'd like to blame it on the whole, "I'm learning english thing" but really?!  Then again, I never can draw a test tube on the board without giggles, so maybe they did it on purpose. 

    Anyways, we continued with density and worked on this lab, which worked well.  A teacher at a JFEW conference told me about it and I adapted the worksheet to fit my classroom.  I start with a demonstration, "Will this orange float in water?"  After I get some predictions, I show them the answer, they have to think about what they know about density and gravity to figure out how things layer according to density. Then they calculate the density of different mystery liquids in a clear straw. I would recommend at least 2 periods for this lesson. The lesson is from this website. I used petri dishes and play doh to make the base. Here is a picture of the winning team, using the calculators funded by donorschoose and my friends, Mark and Rita.

Density in a straw!

     On an entirely separate note, my sister bought me Tyler Florence's cookbook at Homegoods for 5 bucks a while ago.  This was one of the best dishes.  Here's the recipe. Seriously, amazing. Plus you can throw the extra watercress into your ramen the next day. Genius.

Bacon, avocado, tomato, watercress, lemon.