Creating Learning Centers to Support Skills

Creating Learning Centers to Support Skills Learning Centers can be an important and fun part of your instructional environment and can supplement and support the regular curriculum. They create opportunities for collaborative learning as well as differentiation of instruction. A learning center is usually a place in the classroom designed for different tasks that students can complete in small groups or alone. When there are space constraints, you can use a display as a learning center with activities that children can take back to their desks. Organization and Administration Many primary classrooms have center time, when children move to a specific part of the classroom. There they can either choose which activity to pursue or rotate through all the centers. In intermediate or middle school classrooms, learning centers can follow completion of assigned work. Students can fill in checklists or pass books to show they have completed a required number of activities. Or, students can be rewarded for completed activities with a classroom reinforcement plan or token economy. In any case, be sure to have a record keeping system that is simple enough for the children can keep themselves. You can then monitor their progress with a minimum of attentionreinforcing their sense of responsibility. You might have monthly charts, where a monitor stamps completed activities for each learning center. You could cycle through monitors each week or have monitors for each specific center who stamps students passports. A natural consequence for children who abuse center time would be to require them to do alternate drill activities, like worksheets. Learning centers can support skills in the curriculumespecially mathand can broaden students understanding, or provide practice in reading, math or combinations of those things. Activities found in learning centers could include paper and pencil puzzles, art projects connected to a social studies or science theme, self correcting activities or puzzles, write on and erasable laminated board activities, games and even computer activities. Literacy Centers Reading and Writing Activities: There are lots of activities that will support instruction in literacy. Here are a few: Laminate a short story into a folder, and give prompts for students to respond.Laminate articles about popular television or music personalities, and have students answer Who, What, Where, When, How and Why questions.Make puzzles where students match initial letters and word family endings: example: t, s, m, g with the ending old. Math Activities: Puzzles matching problems and their answers.Color by number puzzles using math facts to come up with the numbers.Board games where students answer math facts on the spaces they hit.Measuring activities with scales, sand and different size measures such as cup, teaspoon, etc.Geometry activities where students make pictures with geometric shapes. Social Studies Activities: Combine literacy and social studies activities: Write and illustrate newspaper articles about: the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the discovery of America by Columbus, the election of Barack Obama.Matching card games: match pictures to names of historical figures, shapes of states to the names of states, capitals of states to the names of states.Board games based on historical eras, such as the civil war. You land on Battle of Gettysburg. If youre a Yankee, you go forward 3 steps. If youre a Rebel, you go back 3 steps. Science Activities: Centers based on the current content, say magnets or space.Place the planets correctly on a velcroed map.Demonstrations from the class that they can do in the center.

Fermion Definition in Physics

Fermion Definition in Physics In particle physics, a fermion is a type of particle that obeys the rules of Fermi-Dirac statistics, namely the Pauli Exclusion Principle. These fermions also have a quantum spin with contains a half-integer value, such as 1/2, -1/2, -3/2, and so on. (By comparison, there are other types of particles, called bosons, that have an integer spin, such as 0, 1, -1, -2, 2, etc.) What Makes Fermions So Special Fermions are sometimes called matter particles, because they are the particles that make up most of what we think of as physical matter in our world, including protons, neutrons, and electrons. Fermions were first predicted in 1925 by the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who was trying to figure out how to explain the atomic structure proposed in 1922 by Niels Bohr. Bohr had used experimental evidence to build an atomic model which contained electron shells, creating stable orbits for electrons to move around the atomic nucleus. Though this matched well with the evidence, there was no particular reason why this structure would be stable and thats the explanation that Pauli was trying to reach. He realized that if you assigned quantum numbers (later named quantum spin) to these electrons, then there seemed to be some sort of principle which meant that no two of the electrons could be in exactly the same state. This rule became known as the Pauli Exclusion Principle. In 1926, Enrico Fermi and Paul Dirac independently tried to understand other aspects of seemingly-contradictory electron behavior and, in doing so, established a more complete statistical way of dealing with electrons. Though Fermi developed the system first, they were close enough and both did enough work that posterity has dubbed their statistical method Fermi-Dirac statistics, though the particles themselves were named after Fermi himself. The fact that fermions cannot all collapse into the same state - again, thats the ultimate meaning of the Pauli Exclusion Principle - is very important. The fermions within the sun (and all other stars) are collapsing together under the intense force of gravity, but they cannot fully collapse because of the Pauli Exclusion Principle. As a result, there is a pressure generated that pushes against the gravitational collapse of the stars matter. It is this pressure which generates the solar heat that fuels not only our planet but so much of the energy in the rest of our universe ... including the very formation of heavy elements, as described by stellar nucleosynthesis. Fundamental Fermions There are a total of 12 fundamental fermions - fermions that arent made up of smaller particles - that have been experimentally identified. They fall into two categories: Quarks - Quarks are the particles that make up hadrons, such as protons and neutrons. There are 6 distinct types of quarks:Up QuarkCharm QuarkTop QuarkDown QuarkStrange QuarkBottom QuarkLeptons - There are 6 types of leptons:ElectronElectron NeutrinoMuonMuon NeutrinoTauTau Neutrino In addition to these particles, the theory of supersymmetry predicts that every boson would have a so-far-undetected fermionic counterpart. Since there are 4 to 6 fundamental bosons, this would suggest that - if supersymmetry is true - there are another 4 to 6 fundamental fermions that have not yet been detected, presumably because they are highly unstable and have decayed into other forms. Composite Fermions Beyond the fundamental fermions, another class of fermions can be created by combining fermions together (possibly along with bosons) to get a resulting particle with a half-integer spin. The quantum spins add up, so some basic mathematics shows that any particle which contains an odd number of fermions is going to end up with a half-integer spin and, therefore, will be a fermion itself. Some examples include: Baryons - These are particles, like protons and neutrons, that are composed of three quarks joined together. Since each quark has a half-integer spin, the resulting baryon will always have a half-integer spin, no matter which three types of quark join together to form it.Helium-3 - Contains 2 protons and 1 neutron in the nucleus, along with 2 electrons circling it. Since there is an odd number of fermions, the resulting spin is a half-integer value. This means that helium-3 is a fermion as well. Edited by Anne Marie Helmenstine, Ph.D.