Integrated Science Lab

SLURB's are very social creatures! They like to interact with anyone that they come into contact with. Much like the penguins pictured below.

What exactly is a SLURB? A slurb is a made up creature that I utilized during my integrated science lab. In all reality, all it was, was flour. However, one of them contained baking soda as well!

The SLURB's were told to interact with one another for approximately 5 minutes. At the end of the 5 minutes, I told students to return to their seats. I explained to them that there had been an outbreak! One of the SLURB's that was interacting with everyone was carrying a harmful disease and now we needed to determine who was initially infected and how many others had become infected.

How exactly did we determine who was infected? I added vinegar to each of the cups, if the contents in the cup bubbled, I knew that baking soda was present which meant that the SLURB was infected.
The problem: All of the SLURB's were infected because everyone interacted with the same people.

Let's Gem and Opp it out!

Gems:
Students were able to move around the room.
The activity was very interactive. 
The activity connected well to the lesson: how diseases spread.






Opportunities for improvement:
Provide a worksheet to help students keep track of who they came into contact with.
Explain to students that they should try not to interact with everyone.
Provide more instruction prior to "letting them go".

At the end of the day, I feel as though my lesson went well and I will definitely be using it with some tweaks during my student teaching experience!