Catching Up

We have been looking at ecological systems and cycles within systems. We have played a simulation game that replicates food webs and how different species interact within a food web and what happens when a member of the food web is removed. After playing the game several times we modified the rules to make it a more realistic model of the system.
Lots of new vocabulary words and definitions. Click the links to download them as GoogleDocs.
Ecology Notes #1
Ecology Notes #2
We will be starting our bird projects soon.

Tennis Balls

We dropped tennis balls from different heights and onto different surfaces, then measured how high they bounced and how many times they bounced.  We tried different ways to measure our results using meter sticks. With this data we then created simple graphs to show our results.

Dropping the Ball

We tried out our ball dropping investigations today. Each team got a tennis ball and a meter stick. They gathered their data and some of them even analyzed their results. We measured how high the ball would bounce after being dropped from a set height. We also measured how high it would bounce for each consecutive bounce until it stopped bouncing. We counted the number of bounces when dropped from different heights. Each group then shared their processes and results and compared how they took their notes and designed their investigations.

New Year and New Students

A new school year and a new group of students.
We are starting class with looking at how to do a science investigation.
We started with the question, What will happen when I drop a ball? Then we went on to clarify exactly how we would set up a procedure to find the answer to this question. What sort of ball? From what height? Onto what sort of surface? How will we measure our results?
Then we tried it out in groups of 1, 2, or 3.

Science Day

Science Day was  a big success. We had a lot of fun with all the different presenters and workshops. We are now starting our Physics unit. Today we made batteries from pennies and salt solutions. Tomorrow we have Arthur Morgan School visiting to share about their field trip that has focused on food and energy.  It is a block schedule week so we won't have regular schedule until Thursday when we will learn how to use the computer simulations for designing our electric vehicles.

Science Investigation Posters

Each student will design a science investigation. Either an experiment or a systematic observation and then make a poster about it to be shared on Science Day, March 9th. The posters are due Wednesday, March 7th. Here are The Poster Guidelines. And here is a Rubric for the Poster. We will be working on these outside of class during this week. All the investigations should be finished and all the data gathered by this weekend, so that we can make the posters on March 5th and 6th.

Mysteries of the Periodic Table Revealed

This week we have been drawing models of atoms, and using the periodic table to help us figure out how many protons, electrons and neutrons are in each atom. We figured out how many electron shells there are for each atom and how many electrons can fit into each shell. Here are the notes that we have been using: Mysteries of the Periodic Table Revealed (part one) and Mysteries of the Periodic Table Revealed (part two)