Stations in the Middle School Classroom

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With the start of the new year I have one again tried something new in my classroom.  (I am always trying something new as I always want to make my classroom better!)  One of the things that I am trying with my 7th grade students is stations.

Right now I have been setting up around 4 stations for each topic and students take two days to work through these stations.  These stations include all of the student notes that they need and any related activities.  Right now students are working through these stations in any order in any group they make.  My goal is to, one day soon, create my own groups for the students based on their ability levels.  Then I can create some stations that are just for my high achieving students and some just for my lower achieving students.  This is my way of approaching differentiation in the classroom.

Throughout out the year I plan to share the stations that I have come up with and the activities that go along with each.  I will let you know how it goes and look forward to hearing your feedback!

Classification

A mini-bundle on classification. This includes a set of teacher notes, a set of cloze notes and a powerpoint. This set includes the history of classification, binomial nomenclature and the levels of classification. As some schools are teaching domain as a level and some do not, there are version both with and without domain included.

You can find this item on Teachers Pay Teachers and Syllabuy.  

creating accounts on websites that require e-mail address (when kids don't have them)

Sometimes you need to make accounts for students and those accounts need e-mail addresses.  The problem is that sometimes your kids are too young to have e-mail addresses.  I found out about this hack a few years ago, but I'm just remembering to share it now.  All you have to do is to add +1, +2, +3....to the end of your e-mail address.  Then it is like the students have an e-mail address, but all messages go to your e-mail address.

For example, if you were teacher@gmail.com, then you could use teacher+1@gmail.com, teacher+2@gmail.com, etc.  The site you are using sees this as a new e-mail address, but any e-mail sent to it goes to your e-mail address.

I know that this works on Google and believe that it works on Yahoo as well.  This is a workaround so there are no guarantees that it will work every time.

Have you had success with this?

This post also appears on my blog The Tech Savvy Science Teacher