Week 13

4/24/2025


This week we discussed different substances that have different densities. My group drew a model of this showing that a rock and a piece of wood might weigh the same. The vast difference is that the piece of wood was floating because the molecules are farther apart and the rock was at the bottom of a lake because the molecules are closer together. I thought this was a good way to use a particle model to explain the properties and behavior of matter. 


We got to participate in an M&M investigation looking at why M&M colors spread out when they are placed in water. My group was confused at first at what we were being asked for and just threw our M&M’s in the water. There were no rules set in place and we didn’t decide on an hypothesis. The second test we recorded a time specifically 45 minutes and decided to measure the circumference of each color. We felt a lot more comfortable having rules to follow and keep the same.


I think this investigation is a great way for students to critically think about how they can discover what is happening in front of them. Dr. Nordine had us tinker around to figure out what rules we wanted to apply to investigate our test of M&M’s. This is something I want to include within my science teaching, allowing students to tinker around with things and be curious.






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 6

Image
  2/26/2025 This week in the lab I got to look into a specific biome and understand the depths of it. Our group's chosen biome was a grassland. I knew that grasslands were mostly open areas that mostly had the ideal environment for growing grass. I learned that these areas get low rainfall amounts, just enough to allow the grass to grow, not necessarily trees. There were also a large amount of animals I didn’t realize lived in the biome like raccoons and capaparas. Another thing I learned today is that you can pollinate flowers with dead bees. We used the dead bees to pollinate our fast growing flowers. In the end portion of class we talked about the amount of baby turtles that don’t make it to adulthood. I have in the past done many projects on sea turtles and their survival rates. I was aware of the many factors humans can assist with that go into turtles survival like turning off porch lights and disposing of garbage correctly. Both of these help turtles in ways to use the moonl...
Read more

Week 15

Image
5/8/2025 This week I clarified a lot of the experiments that we have investigated through the last five weeks of the semester. I connected that when a plunger is stuck to a table the particles on the outside are pushing down on the plunger. Another connection I made was when doing the balloon, baking soda, and vinegar experiment we are surrounded by air. When the balloon blows up it pushes air out of the way. When you blow up a balloon in air you are pushing air out of the way. This is called buoyancy.  It was a little confusing or maybe just mind boggling that when we shook the vinegar and baking soda a gas was produced, but the weight did not change. At the closure of lab it was made clear that there is a gas that was produced that was not there before and it doesn't affect the weight.  All the experiments that Dr. Nordine has introduced to me and assisted in conducting can be done in my future classroom. I have learned that explaining the WHY to kids is important and as an ...
Read more

Week 10

Image
4/4/2025 This week I did not necessarily learn anything super new in lab. We did an overview of information and activities that reflected on our learning from the past weeks because of the cumulative exam we took this week. Our in class activity this week incorporated natural selection and evaluation. The activity showed how evaluation is more favorable towards some traits and how it becomes more favorable in organisms over time.  The overall concept of evaluation makes sense to me, but the activity confused me. It was not clear to me that the utensils each individual in a group were given were the specific traits. After each round the utensil (organism) that picked up the least amount of beans got to pick a different utensil. I did not fully grasp the general concept of this until after the game. Looking back I now understand that natural selection is a driver for evolution because the favorable traits in an organism lead to the traits that are more commonly seen in a population....
Read more