Science at Bangor & in the News
Both chemistry & science 9 wrapped up the units they were working on. When we get back from break, we will review what we've learned so far this year & start working on new material before final exams. Exams are January 20-22. The students will be in school all day on Wednesday, January 20 and will only report for the morning on Thursday, January 21, and Friday, January 22. Hopefully we will not loose a week to snow & cold this year like we have the past few years.
After we finished our units, both classes spent the past two days being crafty & playing science games. I enjoyed seeing the students' creativity as we made ornaments using a Borax solution. When we get back from break we will discuss how and why the crystals formed in the Borax solution. Here are some highlights below.
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In Science 9 we wrapped up the unit on particles & matter. We spent the week on density: the amount of stuff (matter) in a certain amount of space (volume). This week we began using the relationship between density, mass, & volume to solve problems using algebra. This idea was a challenging one, so we will practice problem solving some more next week before the end of unit assessment. We wrapped up the week with a lab practical. Each group chose a sample of material and needed to identify what the material was made out of. In order to be successful, the groups had to accurately measure mass and volume so that they could calculate the density.
Chemistry finished the unit on energy and states of matter and took the end of unit assessment on Friday. Before the assessment, we learned about how much energy gets absorbed or released in systems. To do this, we took what we were doing with the LOL charts & started to put numbers to the energy flow. This was very challenging and I am very proud of how hard the students worked to understand what we were doing. I'm sorry for the late update. Last weekend I performed with the Kalamazoo Bach Festival Choir in our Christmas concert, so I didn't get a chance to update the blog.
In chemistry we spent the week talking about how energy affects how particles move & how they are arranged. We illustrated the flow within energy accounts using energy bar charts, also known as LOL diagrams. The students did a great job learning to work with this new tool and I think it helped some people get a better understanding of how energy going into or coming out of the different energy accounts changes what is happening to the particles. At the end of the week we learned about how we can figure out the quantity of energy going into or out of a system. We are continuing to work on energy calculations this week. We did two different labs last week in Science 9. The first lab looked at how mass does or doesn't change depending on the experiment. This lab allowed us to discover the Law of Conservation of Mass: mass in a system doesn't change unless we add or subtract stuff (matter). Our second lab looked at how mass & volume are related to each other. We spent today looking at our data and talking about density. We will be wrapping up the unit this week and will have the Unit 4 assessment on Wednesday next week. Below are some pictures from both the mass and change lab and the mass and volume lab. |
Ms. Lyons
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May 2016
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