Science at Bangor & in the News
I can't believe the year is almost over. We have 7 days of regular school and 3 days of finals left. Chemistry is officially senior-less as of Wednesday, so the end of the week felt a bit empty without them. We will be wrapping up our last topic this week and then we will review for the final exam. Science 9 will be finishing up their last unit assessment on Tuesday. The next few days after will be a review to prepare for the final. Both classes will be taking their free-response portion of their finals in class on Tuesday, June 7 and Wednesday, June 8. The time during final exams will be to take the multiple choice portion. The final exam schedule is below.
Thursday, June 9-1st hr (2nd & 3rd hr review), 4th hr (5th & 6th hr review) Friday, June 10-2nd hr& 3rd hr (1/2 day for students) Monday, June 13-5th hr & 6th hr (1/2 day for students)
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Chemistry is inching toward our Diet Coke & Mentos geyser day & just wrapped up our chemical reactions unit. We are now starting to learn about how much stuff is involved in chemical reactions & how to use the balanced reaction to figure out how much reactant we need or how much product we can make. In order to introduce this idea, we made s'mores. We needed 2 graham crackers, 1 marshmallow, and 3 pieces of Hershey's chocolate to make 1 s'more. We knew how many of each ingredient we had, so we could figure out how many whole s'mores we could make. It was a tasty way to begin this unit. We have moved on to start solving problems with chemical reactions. In Science 9 we are continuing to explore motion. This week we moved from a new way to represent an object's motion visually to distinguishing objects with constant velocity from those with constant acceleration. We can all picture a car maintaining its velocity (speed) or a car speeding up, but it is a little more difficult to determine what is happening just by looking at a graph. As we continue to practice analyzing graphs, more light bulbs are going on & we are starting to connect what is happening on the graph to what an object would actually be doing.
We wrapped up our chemistry unit on interacting particles by talking about energy in reactions. We used energy bar charts (affectionately known as LoL charts since that's what the charts look like) to show what happens to energy in a chemical reaction. We were able to show transferring energy between the thermal energy account (how fast the particles move) and the chemical energy account (how the atoms in a molecule are arranged). We also showed how energy can come into a reaction system from outside or be released into the surroundings from the reaction. This is a complicated process to learn and I'm very proud of how the students kept sticking with it & asking questions until they understood what was happening & why reactions happen the way they do.
In Science 9, we continued our study of motion using tumble buggies. This week we started the buggies from different points & sent them in the opposite direction of one another. We used this to start talking about how it is more useful to show an object's position at certain times instead of just how far an object has gone from its starting point. We will continue to learn about motion for the next couple of weeks. We performed 2 different experiments this week in chemistry. Our first experiment looked at 5 different types of chemical reactions. We were able to perform one set of experiments in lab, I demonstrated another, and we used a YouTube video from a friend to view the other 3 types of experiments. Two of our previous labs were also examples of one of the types of reactions. The next day, we talked about when we actually use some of these reactions in our daily life. After some thinking, we came up with good examples of the different reaction types. Our second lab let us observe & feel the difference between endothermic reactions and exothermic reactions. Endothermic reactions need energy put into them to make them happen. We observed a reaction that used the thermal energy from the room temperature water to happen, so we could see (with a thermometer) and feel the reaction tube get colder as the water transferred its energy to the compound. An exothermic reaction is just the opposite; it releases energy into the surroundings. We saw & felt the reaction tube get warmer as the reaction happened. Most people are familiar with exothermic reactions: the reason we feel warm next to a fire is that the combustion reaction that causes the fire gives off it's extra energy & raises the temperature around the reaction. On Thursday we wrapped up our forces unit in Science 9 by testing our egg protection containers. Mrs. Doe kindly let us drop the containers from the marching band viewing tower. It was a great day to spend some time outside & drop some eggs. All of the eggs survived the fall, although we did lose 1 egg on extraction. The containers all had some common themes, but there were also differences among them. It was great watching the students use their knowledge of forces and collisions to creatively come up with a solution. The last unit we are covering is looking at motion. We started the unit on Friday by measuring how far a toy buggy went in a certain amount of time or how long it took the buggy to travel a certain distance. The weather actually cooperated and we were able to test the buggies outside. We haven't looked at the data yet, but we will refresh our graphing skills starting on Monday when we start analyzing the data.
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Ms. Lyons
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May 2016
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