tuesday, october 20, 2015

I didn't mention Spirit Week in yesterday's entry so I mention it now.  Today's theme was Crazy Hair Day (I wore a mullet wig) and tomorrow's will be to wear something from one's favorite sports team.  Thursday will end the week with Tacky Day.   

I did find out that there are no fall parties but cupcakes can be brought in during lunch (or cookies).

Today we resumed our normal schedule and we continued with the usual warm-up:

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Once the warm-up was collected and discussed, we reviewed the notes from the first two parts of the unit, Matter:  Properties and Change.  

The focus of today was to have the students take notes for the final section of the unit.  This covers the three types of rocks (igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic), how they are formed, and the rock cycle.  Plus we hit weathering, erosion, sediment, and deposition.

Here are the notes:

Rock - a hard solid material made up of at least one mineral
Weathering - the process of causing a rock to break into smaller pieces
Sediment - small pieces of rock and minerals
Erosion - the process of sediment being picked up by wind or water
Deposition - the process of sediment being dropped (deposited)
Igneous - volcanic rocks formed from cooled lava
Sedimentary - rocks that are made up of deposited (dropped) layers of sediment (pieces of rock) on land or especially in water.  Heat and pressure over time harden the layers.  Fossils are only found in sedimentary rock.  It is a record of time.  The deeper down you dig, the further back in time you see.
Metamorphic - “changed”; rock that was one kind is changed due to very high heat and pressure to another kind of rock
Rock Cycle - the process in which rocks change from one type to another over millions of years

For the enrichment portion of the science lesson, I melted chocolate to make "igneous rock" and had the students examine it.  I poured the melted chocolate onto wax paper immediately after they saw the word "igneous" on the screen.  The chocolate was fully hardened by the time we finished taking the notes.

We went over how igneous rocks are formed by rapidly cooling lava (most of them) due to one of the laws of thermodynamics which states that heat will transfer from warmer to cooler until equilibrium is reached.  In other words, a cup of boiling water (212°F) placed in a room at a normal room temperature (70°F) isn't cooled off by the lower air temperature of the room.  Instead, since the temperature of the boiling water is three times hotter than the temperature of the room, the heat energy of the boiling water will transfer to the air in the room and will continue to do so until it runs out of excess energy and the water temperature is roughly equivalent to the temperature of the air (equilibrium).  

The same holds true for lava.  Since the temperature of lava is approximately 2,000°F and is more than twenty times warmer than the surrounding air (or water if it flows into an ocean), the heat will rapidly transfer to achieve equilibrium.

The students were each given a piece where they drew a brief illustration of what they saw, broke it in half, and then wrote a brief description of it in their notebooks.

Today is also the day we began social studies since JA Biztown is now in the past.  We began simply by handing out the consumable books.  Students wrote their names on the inside cover as well as the bottoms.  This way they can be easily identified in a stack.

​We then went over the five themes of geography (location, region, place, human-environment interaction, movement).