Don't Use Red Ink in Your Lab Notebook & Science Is Not Boring

I'm sitting here looking up at my grade level charts of student mastery of what I considered important concepts for this year. On the 6th grade chart I have one out of nineteen 6th graders who mastered calculating speed, time, and distance. An earlier version of me would be worried about this. I would spend the next 2 weeks before their final exam hammering away on this, figuring ways to create small groups to explore their misunderstandings, giving individualized homework, and testing individual mastery several more times before the end of the year. Now I'm trying to plan a few fun activities that will leave them with a nice feeling about science and learning.
There is an 8th grade student I tutor one-on-one for math just about every day. Since Janaury we have been working on adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing fractions. Occasionally we do other stuff, but I try to spend a little time every day on these 4 operations with fractions. She wants to be a chef one day. To build relevance we talk about altering recipes for larger or smaller groups and how these operations with fractions will be important for her career choice. I give her some word problems involving changing a recipe designed for 20 people to a recipe for 8 people. She applies herself when she is with me, and she is fairly good about doing her homework. But still after 4 months she can't consistently keep straight when she needs to find a common denominator to add or subtract and when she needs to take the reciprocal of the divisor and multiply numerators and denominators. If I can finally manage to get her clear on these 4 operatins so she can do them correctly on the final exam, I have very little confidence that she will remember them when school starts in August. Most of what we finally manage to stick into the heads of kids during a school year quickly leaks out over the summer break.
Yesterday the 6th grade was having a free recess. The team that has the most points can call a free recess. I have probably explained this reward system somewhere in one of these blogs. The length of the recess depends on how many points the team has. For teams that don't have the full recess I give them something to do, usually finding and writing the definitions of vocabulary related to the topic we are studying. Yesterday I had them write things they have learned this year.
Here are a few of my favorite: We learned not to use red ink in our notebooks. We learned to speak more English. We learned to put our name, date, and page number in the upper right corner of pages in our lab notebook.
But buried in among all these silly class and school rule things are a few gems:
We learned how to make data tables.We learned how to complete an assignment following a rubric.
We learned that science is fun and not boring.
Hopefully the last one will stick.
Big Idea: Spend time building positive attitudes towards learning.