Cartoons can teach...

Is too much TV bad for students…?  Well I would argue yes.  On the other hand however, if students learn to apply what they learn to some of the shows that they enjoy watching on television, some occasional time in front of the TV is not necessarily a bad thing.

While most of my inspiration for activities that I do in the classroom come from my cluttered imagination, or other elementary school teachers, as I was planning my science lessons this past week, I thought back to my high school biology and chemistry teacher.  While I didn’t always appreciate his quirky way of always making extra credit questions based on Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, or Monty Python (I never got any of them correct…hahaha), I will admit that he did always make learning fun!  I remember vividly, his blackboard being covered with colorful hand-drawn illustrations of sometimes-difficult scientific topics.  The illustrations most oftentimes included memorable characters from pop-culture and there was one scene that came back to me last weekend as I was planning for my week.

While I cannot remember what class it was, I remember this teacher drawing an example of Wile E. Coyote standing next to a boulder on the side of a cliff, just waiting for the roadrunner to get close enough so that he could force the boulder off the cliff and finally catch that crazy bird.  Our teacher was trying to show us the difference between potential and kinetic energy.  His drawing made us realize that while the boulder was standing at rest on the edge of the cliff, it was storing up energy (POTENTIAL ENERGY), and I remember being told that in order for the boulder to eventually have kinetic energy, it would have to be acted upon by a force in order to make it move.

Keeping in mind, the memorable science classes that I had as a high school student, I created a PowerPoint and an activity using the Looney Tunes as examples of potential and kinetic energy.  After we went through the slideshow and took notes on the new vocabulary, we watched an episode of the Roadrunner and we looked for examples of potential and kinetic energy throughout the show.  After we had shared some of our examples of energy, I gave each student some colorful printouts of various Looney Tunes examples and they had to create a cartoon scene exhibiting potential energy and a cartoon scene exhibiting kinetic energy. 

For the next few slides, see if you can decide how potential energy is being exhibited...

Roadrunner is a perfect example of kinetic energy...always on the MOVE!

Daffy Duck is saying, "I believe I can fly..."  Can anyone say SPACE JAM!  Hahahaha!

All in all, we had a lot of fun in science class this week using a movies (Star Wars PowerPoint) and TV shows as a learning tool.  Our unit on forces and motion is off to a great start, and we are all excited to learn even more!

For now… “That’s all folks!”