This year I took on the adventure of flipping my class.  I wanted to be able to spend more time working with my students on higher level tasks and less time giving them the basic information. I chose to flip my class to meet that need.  Most of the time a flipped class is done with the students watching a video explaining the basic information at home and then the typical homework is done in class with the students getting help from their peers and teacher.  This allows for differentiation and for the ability to tackle more complex tasks in class.  

What happens if you don’t have access to technology.  That is what I ran into during 4th quarter.  Due to state testing, I did not have access to the chrome books like I normally do.  I still wanted to have my students learn the basics at home so we could tackle the higher level tasks in class.  To do this I created a summary for the students to read.  They had to read the summary and underline evidence in the summary to answer the essential question I gave them. For example, when they read about how stars are classified their essential question was how do scientists classify stars? After they read and marked the summary they had to put the information into Cornell notes.  For this one I had them also create a tree map (a graphic description that shows how they are categorized).  The following day in class the students worked on an H-R diagram that had varied level of questions.  My students did this type of flip for all of their universe topics from the solar system to stars to galaxies.  It worked really well and my students liked the fact that they could get help on some of the harder level questions.