Monday, June 20, 2011

READ ME FIRST!

Congratulations on finishing another school year, and welcome to AP biology!

Please read the "Suggestions for Reading and Note-taking" handout (which came along with the summer assignment) before you begin!  Feel free to email me (Mrs. Blood) anytime (lblood@haverhill-ps.org) with any questions.

There are many helpful online resources that come with our textbook, and in some of the Basic Info posts for the summer reading chapters, I have included links to some of these resources and instructions for utilizing them.  These online resources will also be helpful to you throughout the year.  The instructions for accessing the textbook website will be included in the next post.  Please email me if you have difficulty accessing the site.

Good luck with the summer assignment, and have a great summer vacation!

Textbook Website Access

This post has 2 sets of instructions.

First, you will be setting up an online subscription to http://www.phschool.com/ , a website provided by the publishers of our textbook. This site has many resources, some of which we'll be using together and others that you may want to explore on your own.

** Depending on your arrangements with your parent(s) or guardian for using the Internet, you may need to check with him/her/them before creating this subscription. Setting up an account will require you to enter your first and last name and email address. The website you are signing up to access is an educational website, and they do have a privacy policy. But please check with your parent(s) or guardian first if you need to. If this is not something that you and he/she/they are comfortable with, just let me know.

Second, after you set up your subscription, you will be visiting http://www.campbellbiology.com/ to view the resources for chapter 2. You will actually be using the site that goes with the 8th edition of the text, which I hope we will be using come September.  Although you have the 7th edition at home for the summer, there aren't too many differences between the 7th and 8th editions that should affect using the website resources.

Part 1 - Setting up your subscription
1. Go to www.phschool.com/access .  Follow the instructions on the first screen.
2. Where it says "Already Have an Access Code?" click the link "Covered Titles."
3. Select "Campbell, Biology 8e AP* Edition" (yes, 8th edition).
4. On the next screen, click "Student Registration."
5. Review the License Agreement and Privacy Policy; then at the bottom click "I accept." You may want to have a parent or guardian review the Agreement and Policy before you accept it.
6. The next screen will ask, "Do you have a Pearson Education account?" Select no.
7. It will then prompt you to create a login name and password. (Obviously, make sure you record or remember these for future access.)
8. Enter the access code: SSNAST-CHOLI-SPEND-MINNA-LENTO-FFLSE .
9. Enter the account information that is requested.
10. I think this should do it. However, if there are other steps that follow, you should be able to follow the prompts to complete the setup.

Now for the good stuff!
Part 2: Accessing the website
1. Go to http://wps.aw.com/bc_campbell_biology_8ap/ .
2. You will probably be prompted to log in before it takes you to the main page. Enter the login and password information for the subscription you created. ** Note: If it won't let you log in, there may be a lag time between when you set up the account and when you can use it to access the site. Try again later or the next day.
3. Use the drop-down menu at the top (which currently shows "Welcome") to select Chapter 2.  Click "go".
4. You should be in business!  Click on any of the links to explore what's available for this chapter.  Use the drop-down menu again to navigate to any other chapter.

If you have any problems, please email me.

How to use the Basic Info posts

To reiterate what this is all about -
"Basic Info" posts will contain an outline and/or questions to help you find the basic information in each chapter. After reading and taking notes, you should come away with at least this information. Often this should be a review of "Intro Bio" material (the course you took in 9th or 10th grade) or should be on this level. You should NOT limit your reading and note-taking to just this information, but this is what I will expect you to understand mostly on your own, and this is the material that will be on the test in the fall. The tricky details of the chapters will be discussed in class.

Now a little about how I suggest using these posts -
The Basic Info posts for Ch 40-49 will all be in question format.  However, the answers to these questions are not going to be collected.  So you're not doing them for a grade, you're doing them for yourself - to increase the amount of info and understanding you get out of the reading!  If you dash them off in 5 minutes, you won’t get much out of them in the long run.

You might want to read the questions before you read/take notes on the chapter, or you might decide to read the chapter/take notes first, and then go back to make sure that you have included in your notes all the info that the questions ask for.

Writing the answers/info in outline or note form (or including them with the notes you take as you read) is fine - in fact, this might be more useful for studying later than writing out complete sentences.  If you find that some questions are related, you might decide to answer multiple questions together.  You might find that making a table is useful in some cases (for example, in Ch 41, you could make a table for each compartment of the digestive system and for each compartment, include the function, substances that are active there, what the substances do, where these substances are produced, etc.).

Be specific!  An answer like “The liver aids in digestion.” is not really going to help you.  Use good vocab!  Name specific structures (parts), substances and functions.

Please note that the questions are not necessarily in order according to the way information is laid out in the chapter.  Also, you might have to do some thinking (ahh!) - make connections, draw conclusions, etc - each question does not necessarily have an answer that is spelled out directly in a sentence or two somewhere in the chapter, but the information you need to answer the question IS in there.

Lastly, please excuse the order of the posts as they appear on the blog - chapters 40-49 will show up in reverse order.  (This has to do with the way I posted them.)  You should do them in ascending order (start with 2, then 40, 41, etc).

I hope you find these questions helpful.  However, if any of the questions are confusing or you are having difficulty, please email me at lblood@haverhill-ps.org .

Basic Info for Ch 2

Chapter 2 - The Chemical Context of Life, is a relatively short chapter which focuses almost entirely on basics - the basics of chemistry that you will need for our study of biochemistry, which is the chemistry of living matter!  Actually the need for many of the concepts in chapter 2 extends to many other biology topics as well (be on the lookout for them in the human body chapters!).  Therefore you really need to understand and be knowledgable about all of the concepts in chapter 2, so no outline or questions will be posted for this chapter.