Its been a while

The school year has been flying by and it has been very difficult to update the blog lately. I will be making a more conscious effort to log on and update everyone on a regular basis.


Seventh Grade Update: Seventh grade science students are just finishing up our unit on Life Science. We have explored the cell cycle, mitosis, meiosis, DNA replication, and protein synthesis. The students had a lot of fun building 3D models out of candy, pipecleaners, and other materials last week. The models turned out great, but unfortunately my digital camera is currently decommissioned so I have no way to take pictures of their masterpieces.

Eighth Grade Update: Eighth grade students have completed our unit on Physical Science. This unit allowed students to explore chemical and physical reactions in a laboratory based setting. Lots of exploring and discovery occurred while students experimented with different substances in the lab. Now we are moving on to a new unit on Weather. This unit is new to the Indiana Science 8 curriculum, and without a textbook it is proving to be quite a challenge to find age-appropriate resources for the students. We have begun with an overview of the atmosphere and are now beginning to explore the effects of Global Warming. We have been watching the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" to introduce the  concept and this week we will be delving further into the details of how global warming happens and what it means for life on Earth.

In other news, Twitter is turning out to be a wonderful resource for information about current events. Just last week I stumbled across an AP article about this years atmospheric CO2 levels. I shared the article with my students to help them understand that this is a very real issue that is still affecting the world they live in. I've found that helping students relate to the material we are learning makes them much more motivated to learn. Twitter provides us with an instant resource to news and information related to our classroom topics. Although students are reluctant to use Twitter (its obviously not as cool as Facebook) I'm hoping with time and exposure they will warm up to its use.