This morning was the final activity with UW Oshkosh's Science Outreach program. Follow the previous link to see their web site filled with links to other web resources.

We attended many short science lessons this morning learning about how hover crafts work, UV materials, endo/exothermic reactions, earthquakes, and phases of the moon. This was a great cumulative activity to do with our class. We all seemed to have quite a bit of fun. Thirty new photos have been added to our SIR photo album. Here are some of the pictures that I took:

Have a great weekend, kids! Hope you had as fun of a week as I did.

Tags: sir

Today we learned about comets and what makes up a comet. Kids, use the commenting system to name the parts that make up a comet, and to name what materials a comet is made of. More pictures have been added to our album. Feel free to check them out.

Also, some of you were interested in binary as a language. So, we learned how to make letters and symbols in binary. Pretty cool, huh??
Here is Tommy L.'s:

I wonder what it says?? Hmmmm??
Here is the work for the day:

Tags: sir

Thirty-six new photos have been added to our SIR (Science in Residence) photo gallery. Today we reviewed what we learned about scale models by using balloons to to make models of the Earth, our moon, and Mars. This gave us a great comparison to see the relative size of these objects. We also were able to understand the distance between these objects by keeping them in scale.

Next we learned about the telescopes and how the atmosphere can interfere with what we are seeing from Earth. We then practiced surveying a mystery planet from space without an atmosphere, comparing observations.

Lastly, we observed how meteors impact the surface of a moon or planet by dropping different sized objects into a fake surface. Check out the pictures for more details.

As you notice on our planner sheet, there was not a lot of classwork today. We are in the middle of taking our district assessments. We should be finished with everything by the end of the week. Next week we will continue with our current spelling list and language arts story.

Congrats on your math tests, our class average was a 93%!!

Club Geek Challenge:
1. Find a picture on the internet for 5 or more of your spelling words.
2. Upload them to our Digital Briefcase.
3. Go to this thread and paste each of our pictures along with the correct spelling of each word.
4. Look for me to post back, get your reward in the morning.

Tags: sir

Here are 28 photos from our SIR Program. Head on over to the Albums area of Marchionda.org or simply click on the image below. Enjoy!

p.s. For extra credit - comment the adverb in my sentence above.

Tags: sir

SIR (Science in Residence) has begun! Today we met our college age scientists from UW Oshkosh who are cementing in some finishing concepts from our study of space. Today we learned about scale models and why they are useful. We also built a scale model of the Sun and compared it to a scale model of Jupiter. We learned that all models have to be shrunk down the same amount in order to compare them accurately. After making these models we were able to view scaled models of stars that are much larger than our Sun.

We also learned that 109 Earths would fit in a line across the sun. With the Earth able to have 4 of our moons fitting across it, that would total 109x4=436 moons across the Sun! Wow!! We also learned that our moon has a name, Luna.

Lastly, we sorted stars by temperature, color, and size.

I have taken a bunch of photos on my iPhone, but it died and I have no power here at school for it. When I get home I will upload the photos and make another blog post to let you know they are up. Each day I will add photos to the album. By Friday we should have quite a few photos. Check back later tonight for the first batch of photos.

Who knows what tomorrow will bring? It should be fun!!

What was your favorite activity today? Comment below!!

Congratulations are in order. Mackenzie, you did a great job accomplishing the Club Geek Challenge below. Anyone else want to give it a shot? You have until the end of the week.
Club Geek Challenge:
1. Find a picture on the internet for 5 or more of your spelling words.
2. Upload them to our Digital Briefcase.
3. Go to this thread and paste each of our pictures along with the correct spelling of each word.
4. Look for me to post back, get your reward in the morning.

Tags: sir