Science Instruction
A Jump Start on the High School Sciences: Pre-Season Training Camps, Summer 2007
Westport-based Raging Knowledge Educational Services, Inc. is offering its popular Pre-Season Training Camps in high school biology, chemistry and physics for the sixth summer in a row. Raging Knowledge, a learning center founded in 2000, provides comprehensive tutoring and educational care to students in grades K-12. The Camps are run in August and are designed to demystify each of the sciences just before high school students go on to tackle biology, chemistry and physics on their own.
Raging Knowledge offers two 2-week Camps throughout August in each of the sciences. The Camps provide 2 hours of instruction daily for a total of 20 hours of intensive, small group teaching. Highly qualified and passionate instructors will introduce students to the 10 most important concepts they will need to succeed in each of the sciences. Additionally, Raging Knowledge instructors will teach the academic and study skills required to ace science tests throughout the school year.
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Biology
Biology is the most language-intensive of the three basic sciences. Students truly need to treat learning biology like learning a foreign language; first identify the important vocabulary words in the chapter, learn them and then tackle the chapter. Otherwise, reading each chapter will become a cumbersome task, requiring students to pause after every other sentence to try and decipher the text. The vocabulary words should be learned using flashcards (we prefer www.flashcardexchange.com, a free service) and reviewed regularly. Creating flashcards for every unit and storing them online will make studying for comprehensive mid-terms and final exams much easier.
Biology is also a very visual discipline, requiring students to understand the spatial relationships among the different parts of a cell or among the parts of the body. There are two important things to remember to overcome this hurdle. First, students should get very comfortable drawing some of these things from memory. There is no better way to understand the parts of the cell and their functions than to draw them on a blank piece of paper and identify them. Secondly, students need to use an internal “zoom lens” to think about biology. After all, biological systems operate in parallel across several orders of magnitude in size: atoms —> molecules —> cells —> tissues —> organs —> organ systems —> organisms —> populations.
Chemistry
Chemistry is all about the periodic table and its trends. At the beginning of the year, chemistry can seem vocabulary-intensive, requiring students to remember a lot of definitions; however, a good understanding of some very basic terms will go a long way: atom, element, molecule, compound, mole, atomic number, atomic mass, ion, isotope, electronegativity, ionization energy, electron, proton and neutron. Very quickly, the focus shifts to algebra and scientific notation in a period during the course when students are penalized if they are not extremely careful about the correct placement of their decimal points and significant figures. Throughout the year, students need to hone their word problem-solving skills and their ability to translate measured quantities from one unit to another.
Back to the periodic table. While it may seem like a scary table to analyze, it is really quite elegant and simple to use. In fact, understanding the tendencies of different elements based on their positions on the table will make chemistry much easier to conquer. This knowledge, combined with a lot of practice solving word problems, will almost guarantee a smile on report card day.
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