Shifting to My Big Campus

It has been a month since the last posting on the blog. I have been moving over to the My Big Campus site to   keep things up to date. Since most of the 4th years are doing their Ultimate Writing Classes on My Big Campus, it seemed to make sense to get everyone working on the same format. All of the 4th years now have a username and password to access My Big Campus.

Chemical Bonding

Today was an introduction to the three main types of chemical bonds: Metallic, Ionic, and Covalent. We looked at 5 videos and interactive programs on the website Teacher's Domain to get an understanding of how these different types of bonds work.

You can see some of what we did at www.teachersdomain.org Search for ionic bonding, covalent bonding, and types of chemical bonding.

 Here is a link to the summary notes that we used: Chemical Bonding Notes.

Tomorrow is the last day to turn in Science Notebooks.

Science Poster Project Launch

Today I went over a Rubric for The Science Poster Project along with the due dates for the various parts of the project.
Here are those due dates: 

Question and Basic Outline of Project: Thursday, Feb 14

Materials, Procedure, Variables outlined: Tuesday, Feb 19

Data collected and Experiment completed: Wednesday, Feb 27

Poster Finished: Tuesday, March 5

Science Day: March 8

We revisited our Periodic Tables and learned more about how to use them in drawing atomic models. We used the clues from Mysteries of the Periodic Table Revealed to help us diagram different types of atoms. We practiced drawing atoms showing the numbers of protons, neutrons, and electrons and where they are located in the atom, including how many electrons are in each shell. Atomic Models.

Last Week of the Term

Last Friday we did our Dry Ice Investigations and gathered all of our data. Monday we rewrote our investigations in our science notebooks as final copies. These included stating our guiding question, our hypothesis, our methods and materials, listed our independent, dependent, and control variables, showed our data tables, and wrote a summary of what happened and what we learned from it, including what went well and what did not. Monday we also started thinking about the experiments that we will do for the Science Day Posters. 

Dry Ice Introduction

Today we compared water ice with dry ice. We focused on making careful observations. We then added energy in the form of hot water and made further observations. We will continue these investigations this week.

Heat Energy and Visiting Teacher

1st and 2nd periods went over the transfer of heat energy and how it relates to the kinetic energy of molecules. We discussed models for describing how temperature relates to the motion of molecules. Here is a link to the questionnaire that we used. Energy and Matter Questionnaire. Third period we had a visit from the Head Teacher Candidate, Kip Kuhn. He did an activity that looked at chemical versus physical change.

Phase Changes

Today we looked at phase changes and states of matter. We reviewed condensation, evaporation, sublimation, freezing and melting. We did a demonstration with a soda can, water, and a hot plate. As the water vapor condensed in the can it created a lower pressure inside the can and the atmospheric pressure crushed the can. Here are links to two videos demonstrating the same process.
Can crush video and train car implosion video.