tuesday, september 15, 2015

This was a busy day in science!  Before I get into a full description of what the students did today, I would like to bring up a few reminders.  

First, the homework that was assigned last Friday is due this Friday, which is the 18th.  
Second, the unit test is going to be on the 22nd, which is one week from today.  While I am going to review each day, it is still each student's responsibility to review the notes and recall what they have learned.  It will have 20 questions rather than the 10 from the quiz.

The students came in and did the following warm-up:

Then we did some more warm-up reviews together:

Once the reviews were finished, we went into the main activity:  DIY batteries and hooking them up.  The purpose of this activity is to reinforce through hands-on experience the concept of positive and negative polarity.  Each pair was given two small plastic containers filled with salt water with each lid having a galvanized nail and a copper nail protruding.  Two things are important:  the nails must not touch each other and they need to be in contact with the salt water.  

Then, we took alligator clip test leads and connected them to one battery.  One test lead was hooked up to the copper nail and one to the galvanized.  We then connected them to an analog multimeter to measure the voltage.  

I used analog meters because they were less expensive and did not require the use of a battery, unlike the digital.  Then, we disconnected the multimeters and hooked up all of the batteries in the set followed by measuring the voltage.

The next activity was to combine all of the batteries at one table, which should produce approximately 4-5 volts and enough to power a small LED light.  

The last activity was only for my homeroom class at the end of the day since we ran out of time with the other two classed:  hook up the electromagnet made two weeks ago and see if it worked.  

Each student should be taking his/her electromagnet home.  

Once more......I have a slide show of the students in action.