This year, I'm teaching at a Los Angeles County charter school that is giving me the freedom (but not the funding) to design my own hands-on, project-focused curriculum. In the photos above, you'll see a sample of some of the collaborative and individualized projects that have immersed my students in life-science and biology. (If your browser doesn't switch the slides above automatically, you can click on the first photo to scroll through.) The lack of a lab budget does not equate to a lack of creativity, so my students and I got innovative with our frugal projects. Here's a brief description of some of our activities for 2013-2014:

 

~ Students used iPads to create group presentations that allowed them to teach topics to each other. These presentations have included slide shows, videos, Garage Band original songs, digital posters, and more.

 

~ Students have explored their own hypotheses as they designed experiments and conducted research for our on-campus science fair. Students presented their experimental results in a variety of ways: demonstrations, PowerPoints, data charts, or traditional poster boards.

 

~ Field trips, including a creek exploration.

 

~ Group lab experiments, including: explorations of how enzymes are affected by temperature and pH; examing how natural objects become compost (or not); and experimenting with the affects of competition on plant growth. Although we don't have room on campus for a garden, we grew and experimented with a variety of potted plants—native and non native, with different reproductive adaptations.