Day 12--Unit 2

I don't have an agenda to post--mainly because I am not able to upload from school right now. This was a bit of a filler day--a day to let me adjust the test date and to show and discuss a good film on the properties of matter. I collected the worksheet, which allowed us to discuss the properties of gold and carbon--how a diamond is different and the same as graphite.

Because of this adjustment day, I got to postpone the test so that no students took it directly after the weekend. Flexibility is good.

Sweet justice.

My thoughts on parents night

Wow. I could not believe how many parents showed up on Thursday. Amazing. We counted, and we had 58! That is 58 out of 102 possible parents--well over 50%.

Thank you to all of the parents that stopped in--I wish I had more of a chance to speak to each of you, but I am glad that I got to present both my wonderful team of teachers and the things we are trying to do to connect our students and bridge the gap to the high school as well as the way that I teach science.

I am also glad that in all four presentations, I got the glassware/jenga tower of imminent failure to actually work--not breaking one thing. Whew!

Sweet justice.

Day 11--Unit 2

So, this was an interesting day--another chance to look at inertia with the jenga blocks, but mostly a chance to look at energy transformations. Energy comes in many flavors, so to speak, electromagnetic, kinetic, potential, chemical, thermal, electrical, and many others. Each form can become the other forms, and understanding this is an important leap for all students of science. But it is not an easy one. We spent some time looking at how the energy from the sun becomes the energy we need to turn a page in a book. Most students were able to come to the understanding that photosynthesis is part of this, a very important part. Without it, we'd have almost nothing to show for all that energy that hits the earth.

Sweet justice.