Weekly Update April 21, 2010

Happy Birthday Earth Day!

You are 40 years old this

Thursday, April 22nd!

Fun with Force, Motion, Mass and Inclined Planes!! How many grams can this spring scale hold?

How many grams of force does it take to get the car rolling?

Does it stay the same once the car is going? Let's use a spring scale to check.

Having fun with force and motion and inclined planes.

Check out our inclined plane design!

Does the distance the cars travel change when we change the angle of the plane?

Now here's a complicated inclined plane!

Everyone had to run and check out this inclined plane design.

Here's What's Going On

In The Beacons' World:

Reading: All the Beacons selected independent reading books.We'll be giving them class time to let them read. We'll then conference with the students individually to discuss the book they are reading. Some students chose very lengthy novels and some chose shorter ones- so some students may get to read more than one book!

Writing: The research portion of the research papers are done. We are now working on composing topic and concluding sentences to make our paragraphs shine.

Math: We've been having a blast working with capacity, and customary units of weight and metric units of mass . We were immediately able to put our new skills to the test in science as we measured the amount of force it took to get objects moving with spring scales. We had fun working with a triple beam balance and weighing things around the room. FYI, homework folders weigh 97 grams (homework included)!

Science: It's been all about getting things moving this week as we combined the simple machine inclined planes and force and motion. Students' creativity really was worked as they created their own inclined plane designs, tested the effect of friction on planes, and experimented with changing plane angles and the distance covered by toy cars. We had lots of zooming sound effects to go along with the fun.

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the better.-

Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Looking forward to another great week at Seabury!

-Betsy and Tamara