Monday, January 11, 2016

This Thursday is the quiz that the students seem to be more than ready for.  But, I will still be reviewing nonetheless.  

On Friday, I ended the week with a mystery for the students.  I told then that I can burn holes in a piece of paper without the use of any flame whatsoever.  As I mentioned before, many ideas were put forth, many of them were quite clever, but few came close.  

Today was the day that the mystery was revealed.  I did tell them that they already knew about the concept.  The First Law of Thermodynamics is that energy cannot be created nor destroyed, it merely changes form or is transferred.

What I did was slam two heavy solid steel spheres against each other with the paper between them bearing the brunt of the impact.  The kinetic energy upon collision transfers to thermal energy (heat) and burns a hole in the paper.  As proof that I am not somehow rubbing away or chipping away small holes in the paper, the unmistakable smell of burn was in the air.

I have a brief video of it below.

I then introduced the classes to STEMscope which is a program that our school (and only a few others in the state) are piloting this year.  Each student is issued a consumable book with serves as both a workbook and a textbook.  There is also an online component as well in which I can assign tasks and even quizzes.  Today was only an introduction and more will be covered later.  We also spent time doing social studies.

This week we will continue with social studies by going over the Wright Brothers and in the literacy tie-in we will be doing my favorite part:  figurative language and idioms.  More later.