Lab Safety Posters

Safety in the High School Science Lab

The first thing science teachers have to do each year - before students can mess about with the science-y stuff - is to go over safety procedures and rules of the lab. It can feel tedious teaching the same thing for five periods in a row, especially when you know they got the same lecture the previous year and the year before that, but it must be done.

If you are interested in what our lab safety contract looks like, you can find it here.

The SOP is to hand out the lab safety contract, discuss the rules, take a tour of the room and review the locations and use of equipment, view a video, and finally, take a quiz. We (science department) usually show "Accident at Jefferson High", but this year Flinn Scientific's lab safety video was discovered so a couple of us showed that as an alternative.

The walls of my classroom start out the year with very little on them as I prefer to have the student work posted instead of purchased or teacher-generated posters. Thus, it makes for a good opening activity for my physical science students to make the lab safety posters. Since I have more than one class and I don't want to fill what little wall space I have with safety posters, my students work in pairs to create a safety poster from one of the rules.

And that is what physical science did today, make lab safety posters. Some were quite clever.