A few weeks ago I wrote about a teacher who uses student self direction learning in her class every Friday - http://sciencenotebooking.blogspot.com/2013/01/student-directed-learning-form.html. Another teacher saw the post and has developed a game plan for next year and wrote about it on her blog (http://jessicaywinston.blogspot.com/2013/05/self-directed-learning.html). I really like her ideas and will be following her posts closely as she implements this great teaching idea (picture of her schedule above is from her blog).
This was fun activity that I got from Roper Mountain Science Institute. They suggested red theater gel to reveal the message, which can get pricy. Another idea I heard was to ask movie theaters to donate left over 3D glasses, which also have a red filter. A guest speaker we had last year said red jello would work. Tried it this week and it worked like a charm. The students thought it was very cool. I found my "attention challenged" students had trouble focusing on making their own secret messages so I was very glad that I had made extra copies of the sheets from the GEMS Color Analyzer book that they could color and then check under the jello.

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