Mrs. Lockwood
"Aerodynamically the BUMBLEBEE shouldn't be able to fly, but the BUMBLEBEE doesn't know it, so it goes on flying anyway"
-Mary Kay Ash
7th Grade LIFE SCIENCE
Well, we made it through our 1st week of school! It was a great week as we all tried to get back into our routines. In 7th grade Life Science class, we revisited the concepts of the Scientific Method with our Mystery Creature experiment. Students OBSERVED a tube, pulled some strings, and tried to EXPLAIN what was on the inside of the tube based on OBSERVATIONS (both vocab words in our unit). It was great fun seeing what kind of "stories" the children came up with to go along with their Mystery Creature. Students have also begun to make up vocabulary notecards for our unit and should be done by the end of this week (17 words). They've already had a vocabulary pre-test and should have an idea of their "difficult words". Please watch for your child to bring home their words on a binder ring and encourage review of these words.
8th Grade PHYSICAL SCIENCE
In Physical Science we "jumped right in" to acting like a scientists. At this level, we use a problem based inquiry approach with the students. Rather than telling students HOW to do things from start to finish, they are provided with a PROBLEM STATEMENT and a FEW MATERIALS. We talk about CRITERIA (what we are trying to do) and CONSTRAINTS (limitations) and students have to come up with a PROCEDURE and collect DATA and come up with the BEST SOLUTION to the problem. In our 1st week, students worked to build a book support. It was great seeing what the students could create with some notecards, rubber bands, and paper clips!
A big part of Physical Science is math. As scientists, we only use Metrics (no inches, miles, etc). Students were given a practice sheet last week in order to refresh themselves on how to convert between metric units (centimeters to meters and more). There will be more to come on Dimensional Analysis. We will be analyzing our data from the OREO COOKIE CHALLENGE this week by making Box and Whisker's Plots. Students will get a practice sheet for HW some time this week.
If you need to reach me, the best way is by email: lockwoodn@fulton.k12.ga.us
I get a lot of emails, so if I don't respond within 24hours, please email again or call the school and leave a message.
