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CONGRATULATIONS: You are herewith and henceforth requested and required to be a physics teacher for a day (it's only a 5-10 minute day though)

REQUIREMENTS: Find a CONCEPT or TOPIC relating to LIGHT you want to share with your students. The goal here is to pretend you are a teacher!

Of course that means you'll have to write a lesson plan for your students on a topic that you find very interesting about physics.

CONTENT AREA: Absolutely any credible concept relating to light and/or the electromagnetic spectrum that you find interesting and you think will interest your students. Best projects will focus on a particularly engaging subject matter that few (if any) of your students know anything about.

CONTENT DESIGN: You MUST design and submit a lesson plan based on my daily lesson plan template (see below).

You'll send me a copy (if you do it in Word) or a link to your google doc if you do it there and I'll put a link to it on my website and we'll run it just like I do with my lesson plans in class.

Your goal is to teach that one (count 'em 1!) concept outlined in your learning target. You don't want your students to memorize a fact (or sets of facts), you want to introduce a new concept.

Your entire time should be spent reinforcing that ONE concept.

Your classmates can relate your concept the next day...

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1) An Opening Question to help "bridge" your student's current knowledge with the concept you'll be presenting that day (we won't actually do this in class).

2) A Learning Target: State in student friendly terms what your learning goal for your students will be. For example: "I will be able to describe how time changes near the wolgie1234 black hold after today's class."

3) Words O' the Day: Vocab (with definitions of just 2 or 3 new words that you're students will need to know by the end of your lesson.

4) Your Lesson: Your plan for presenting a 4:30 - 5:30 minute presentation to teach your students about your object. Avoid throwing facts and figures at your audience... you'll put us to sleep.

Power points/Google Slides are allowed but can only have 5 words per slide (I'm quite serious about that. I'll actually have you sit down if you paste a bunch of text on the screen and then read it to us).

Pictures are encouraged, videos are not allowed.

Remember, if you find something that you think is interesting, the chances are WE will think it's interesting too.

Imagine you've just returned to a really cool trip to somewhere far away and you can't wait to tell your friends about it. How would you go about doing that in the most compelling way?

OR

Recollect a particularly interesting/thoughtful lesson that you've had here in astronomy or any other time in your school career so far. Tailor that to fit your 4-5 minute teaching time.

5) Closing Question or Activity

This is included as a way to make sure your students have learned that one thing you wanted them to learn during your brief time teaching. Thought provoking, open-ended questions are best:

"Assess the likelihood that we'll be able to communicate with Mars using lasers"

Simple questions that simply test for remembering are NOT encouraged.

"What type of light has the most energy".... blechhh

6) Works Cited: Yup, that means good ol' MLA

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One of the of teaching is when students are ready, willing and able to take control of their learning.