Thursday and Friday September 11th, & 12th 2014

Today's Quote:

Today's Lateral Thinking question:

It is estimated that the Earth weighs six sextillion tons (6x10²¹). How much would the Earth weigh if one sextillion tons of concrete and stone were used to build a large wall?

Today's Class:

My voice is better, but with the help of volunteers, we will be able to continue. Students are to turn in their Invitation 13 The idea of hypothesis as soon as they walk into class. Please place it in your manila folder and I will come around to collect it. Then get out a sheet of paper and number it one to eighteen with the proper heading on it and take 5 minutes to look over your vocabulary words.

Invitation 10 The Idea of Hypothesis We will practice with hypotheses by examining this scenario where two twins get sick. We will also examine Global Issues.

This weeks vocabulary.

there will be a quiz on Thursday and Friday

Today's homework:

Watch How to construct a graph.

Today's discussion question:

What is a global issue and what does it mean to be interconnected?

Watch this video over and over. Lab Safety

PM Update:

After the vocabulary quiz, students worked on Invitation 10. We first examined a case where we were observing bees and noticed that they seem to prefer yellow flowers over red flowers. But that raised a few questions like, flowers smell good. The obvious question is, Can bees smell? Students were asked to come up with a testable hypothesis as an in then statement and then think of an experiment to test this hypothesis. As we worked our way around the room it became evident that several factors come into play, including the shape of the flowers, and the colors. I pointed out that in order for an experiment to be considered valid, we had to find a way to isolate one variable and test only it while keeping the others the same. Students got really creative with their ideas such as finding a way to blindfold the bees, or possibly placing a few yellow flowers in an opaque box and a few red flowers in another opaque box and then observing which bow bees fly to more often. How do bees see flowers. After working through this example we tackled a different problem where two identical twins move from Chicago, Illinois to Leadville, high in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and get sick. Students had to develop at least 6 testable hypotheses as to what might be happening.