Hey err'body!
Hope all is well! A couple updates from MS-land.
First thanks to everyone who was able to attend our Curriculum Day event. It's a great experience for our kiddos to be able to demonstrate their learning to you and have that opportunity to present the same idea multiple times. We appreciate all of your questiona and engagement!
We have been busy working through our unit on concepts in chemistry. This has included an exploration of the periodic table and the 1st 20 elements. You may have seen your child feverishly riffling through flash cards in the attempt to memorize their symbols and atomic numbers (at least I hope so). We have observed several different types of chemical reactions in class, making slime and "elephant toothpaste" through the decomposition of hydrogen peroxide. And if you were at our Curriculum Day event, you may have seen the douple replacement of copper oxide and acetic acid during our "cleaning pennies" demonstration.
We are wrapping up our chem unit and getting to move back into some physics with an investigation into waves. Although this will encompass all energy transferring in a periodic way through space or a medium, we will be focussing mainly on SOUND waves. As a mechanical/longitudinal wave, sound energy is all around us and moves at a scale which is easier to understand than microwaves or radio waves, for example. Our unit will culminate in a design challenge wherin the kids will create their own musical instruments reliably capable of produing sounds at different frequencies and amplitudes.
Simultaneously... it's SCIENCE FAIR TIME. Our "Problem Solved Expo" is scheduled for 3/14, which means we are well into our preparations for this event. As middle schoolers, the kids are able to choose inquiry-based, engineering, or Rube Goldberg projets. They have already deided upon these and are in the process of developing them. Here is the list of benchmark dates the kids are aiming for so as to finish the project with minimal stress. These projects can absolutely be worked on at home, although we will have multiple class periods scheduled for their completion as well.
1/29 | topic finalized |
1/31 | all materials acquired |
1/31 | hypothesis written |
2/3 | procedure written |
2/10 | experimentation/construction begun |
2/24 | experimentation/construction concluded |
2/24 | at least one table created |
2/24 | display board acquired |
2/26 | at least one graph created |
3/5 | conclusion written |
3/7 | display board completed |
As you can see, we've got a lot going on! Please ask your students to fill you in with respect to how they are progressing on their fair projects, and please check the Google Classroom with them anytime to get an idea for the assignments and labs we are working on in class! :)
Comentarios