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Introduction and meeting the needs of diverse students

I began this blog for another course (MAT670, I think) but am now updating it for MAT671. I am about to be fifty years old and I am embarking on a new career.  in the past I have been a soldier, a bookkeeper, an advertising executive, a paralegal, and a real estate investor.  For the last two years I have been working as a substitute teacher. My education has kind of been all over the place.  I was homeschooled until I joined the U.S. Army at age 17.  They trained me to be a chaplain assistant, a personnel clerk, and a combat lifesaver (kind like a low level medic.  All it really meant was that I could start IVs, treat for shock, and give morphine).  The army also sent me to The Air Assault School . About a year before I got out of the Army I took a class in sociology at Austin Peay State University and discovered that I enjoyed academics, so when I was discharged from the army and moved to California I started taking classes at De Anza College....
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Reading in the Sciences

My 6th and 7th grade science classes are intensely hands-on, with new labs every week (the tomato & ethylene experiment is the favorite so far.  Deducing mass from volume was the least favorite.)  Nevertheless, I do have two scientific literacy projects planned for the semester.  I decided to include a literacy component after reading Feng and Wei (2010) who showed that even a little bit of reading in the sciences can improve outcomes. The first project is a word wall.  As I envision it, each student will be assigned one word, such as prokaryote or kinetic, and make a small poster with the correct spelling, definition, and etymology (I have been stressing the Greek and Latin roots of scientific vocabulary all semester) of the word.  The students will be given colored markers,  and a dictionary.  The words will be affixed to the walls in alphabetic order.  Each student will present his word to the class; explaining how it is used, the definitio...
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