About Me

Hi.  My name is Krystal Grieger. I am starting my third year of graduate school studying organic chemistry at North Dakota State University (NDSU).  I am a North Dakota native who grew up in the small town of Gardena, ND.  I attended high school in Bottineau, graduating in 2006. In May 2015, I obtained my bachelor's degree from NDSU with a double major in chemistry and chemistry education and a minor in biology.  

I have a wide variety of interests, which range from reading to baking. One of my favorite things that I enjoy doing is scientific outreach activities for kids.  I’ve included some of the links for demonstration ideas which I find interesting if you want to give them a try. In addition to outreach, I was recently elected president of NDSU’s Chemistry and Biochemistry Graduate Student Association so looking forward to see how that goes in the coming year.  Looking further into the future, my long term goal is to teach at a regional university.

Outreach Activities
Making Slime – Slime seems to be the craze these days especially with all the add-ins which can include sequins, beads, glitter, glow-in-the-dark paint or my personal favorite fluorescent dye. I purchased the dye from Education Innovations, though most science education sites carry it.

Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream – Kids seem to find liquid nitrogen super cool and making ice cream with it is a lot of fun. 
** In addition to making ice cream, my personal favorite is to pour some of the LN2 into a container and place balloons into it without telling the students what it in the bucket until afterwards. I usually let little kids predict how many balloons will fit in my bucket and then watch them be amazed as many more fit in, which is followed by the equal surprise when the kids get to watch the balloons “re-inflate” as they warm back up.  Excellent way to demonstrate Charles’ Law. 

Making Casein Plastic – This one works well with older middle to junior high school students as well as with younger students and the scope of the explanation can be tailored to each.

Balloon Spearing – This one can be done as described by putting the dish soap on the balloon itself, or a slightly cleaner way is to put the dish soap in sample vials and have the students dip the skewer into the soap before spearing the balloon.  In addition, if you have the students return the skewers they can be re-used from one demonstration event to the next.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Review of Two Active Learning Theories: Experiential Learning Theory and Inquiry Based Learning Theory

Image
“Learning should be an active process. Too often, students come to school to watch their teachers work. When students use what they learn, they remember the information better and understand the utility of what is being taught.” ~ Dr. Bill Daggett, International Center for Leadership in Education Inquiry-based learning and experiential learning are two beneficial types of active learning which exhibit some similarities, but also key differences which will be addressed in this mini-review blog. Let us begin by looking at experiential learning theory (ELT).  This theory was first proposed by David A. Kolb in 1984 and builds upon John Dewey’s and Kurt Levin’s work in this field. ( Experiential Learning (Kolb), 2007 ). According to the ELT, learning is a continuous process which is grounded in the learner’s experiences so that concepts are obtained from and continuously modified though out life’s experiences. In addition, the ELT defines four learning styles which are addre
Read more

Reflections on our group's project and colleagues presentations

For a group project in our Instructional Technologies course at NDSU,  Macey Kleinjan  and  Nouf Alhomoud , ( Feel free to use the hyperlink to check out their blogs ) and I chose to utilize the ASSURE model to design a lesson plan which we could use to teach our classmates about what we learned about the experiential, problem-based, and inquiry-based learning theories. As we began to work with the ASSURE model, I found the  lesson plan template  that I had previously obtained from Arizona State University's Professional Learning Library to be very user friendly. I personally really appreciated how the first aspect of the ASSURE model is analyzing the learners so that the instruction will be tailored to their specific needs. As we analyzed the class, we realized that as active instructors many of our classmates would likely already be familiar with one if not all three of the learning theories. We therefore transitioned our focus on what we thought would be the most useful for our
Read more