Final Exam Study Tips for Middle School

Final exams are this week in our household, and the tweens have been busy studying for the past week. We asked the girls to share some of their study tips - we hope you find them useful!

• Put your exam dates on the family calendar. That way, your brothers know to not bug you and your parents remember to make you a good breakfast the morning of.

• Make digital flashcards. We found a fun app called Flashcard for the iPhone. It works great and made studying more fun - it was especially helpful for study groups.

• Turn studying for history into a craft project: make a paper timeline. This helped me to understand how long a king's reign or a Chinese dynasty really was.

• Take over your space - my sister turned her closet mirrors into a giant study guide for her Mandarin test by using colorful dry-erase markers on the mirrors. It looks really cool!

• Study outside! My mom didn't want us to miss pool-time during our Memorial Day vacation, so she put our study guide sheets in clear plastic sheet protectors - it worked!

We hope you like these study tips - we used them both for mid-terms and for finals. Last year was the first time we had finals, so our mom made us a Finals Care Package that was filled with all kinds of really fun things.

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Tweens at the USA Science and Engineering Festival

 
This weekend was the second annual USA Science and Engineering Festival. Last year's event was on the National Mall, and this year's festival graduated to the Washington Convention Center. The Expo was packed with vendors ranging from NASA to NOAA to Girl Scouts to the University of Maryland and more. Families with kids of all ages made their way to the Festival throughout the weekend and were treated to workshops from Bill Nye the Science Guy, Potato Chip Science, and Dr. Molecule.

For a tween girl interested in science, #SciFest was the place to be. There were giant DNA models, a chance to chat with astronauts, goop to muck through, giant bubble hula hoops, and instant snow demonstrations. Demonstration winners earned free t-shirts, NASAtote bags, and other science swag. STEM educators and organizations were well represented across every age group.

The Festival is funded primarily by enterpreneur Larry Bock and enjoys support from a Congressional Host Committee.

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Girl Scouts Heart STEM

This week there was a super cool event celebrating STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). Girl Scouts and the New York Academy of Sciences hosted a panel discussion called "Girls Heart STEM" to review results "from a new study conducted by the Girl Scouts on girls' attitudes and awareness of careers in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).

According to the Girl Scout Research Institute study Generation STEM: What Girls Say about Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, 74 percent of girls — and even higher percentages of African-American and Hispanic girls — say they’re interested in the so-called STEM fields of science, technology, math, and engineering. The trick is to break professions into their component parts. Girls who are interested in STEM want to know how things work. They like solving puzzles and problems. They want to understand the natural world."

 

From the Girl Scouts blog, here are the keys to successfully fostering and supporting girls' interests in STEM:

• Engagement: Having an orientation to the sciences and/or quantitative disciplines that includes such qualities as awareness, interest and motivation.
• Capacity: Possessing the acquired knowledge and skills needed to advance to increasingly rigorous content in the sciences and quantitative disciplines.
• Continuity: Institutional and programmatic opportunities, material resources and guidance that support advancement to increasingly rigorous content in the sciences and quantitative disciplines.

Girls also live blogged and live-Tweeted from the event - very cool!

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