For weeks, the 6th graders have been working on a Canstruction. Their wonderful snowman was built at the Galleria Mall in Poughkeepsie on Friday evening. Today, we took the 7th and 8th graders to the mall– not to shop– but to see the snowman. Made of nearly 900 Goya cans, the structure won “Best Use of Label,” and “Best Structural Integrity.” Best of all, though, is that all this food will go to people who need it.
You can participate by visiting the structures by Saturday, December 15. Bring a can or two along and place it in the bin in front of the structure you like best. As of today, PDS was winning this “People’s Choice,” award, but any vote matters to the hungry this winter.
We are very proud of the 6th grade.
Build by the 6th grade at PDS as an entry in the Canstruction Jr. event. The melting snowman is an hommage to the season and an acknowledgment of climate change.
Assuming a role, each student either presented a clean up plan to the town meeting, or represented a constituent in the audience who had a particular and strong opinion about what should be done to protect the town wells from the pesticide contamination. The discussion was heated– and mostly very serious.
Writing a monologue in the voice of the role about to be assumed was important preparation for this empathy building role.
The town meeting is always a hit. And, the teacher gets to rest her voice for a whole two days!
Today we finally started to figure out what to do about the contamination in Fruitvale. A large area of the town has been affected; the good news is that the pesticide has not hit the town wells yet.
The clean-up options are containment, excavation, excavations and incineration, pumping & dumping, or the experimental electrification. Right off the bat, we can tell you, none of the options are ideal.
Every student was given a role to play in the upcoming town meeting. Some students are acting as representatives of companies that want Fruitvale to adopt the method they sell. Other students are acting as audience members with particular and strong points of view. Without knowing each other’s roles, students will come together for a more realistic, rather than scripted, town meeting.
Before talking about the clean-up methods, we practiced measuring plume maps to calculate the amount of time it would take for a plume to reach a well. This is a unit rate calculation, and practice makes perfect.
Draw a plume. Follow the steps for practice. See if you can do the steps without looking.
Today only the seventh grade had class. We read the start of the Science Symposium Handbook to get an idea of the scope of the project and the long time frame. Students will spend six months– from now until early May, working on some aspect of the symposium.
Research questions, one of which will become a project, are due December 12 and 13, depending on section. The most successful students come to talk to me first– and many times after talking, we agree that writing three questions about the same project is the best way to proceed.
Find me at advisory time, during break, and during lunch. Email is an option 24/7!
Eighth graders look for their quotes in this year’s edition of The Science Symposium Handbook.
The Handbook is available at Issuu and Amazon.com, if you should lose your copy.
In school science, everything is supposed to work out perfectly. Students collect data and do an analysis and get the right answer. Not always, at PDS. Getting the “wrong” answer– or getting only a partially illuminating answer, is much more like real life science. So, to be a good teacher, I try to set up frustrating activities. (Big smile!)
In these classes, students used their well testing data to map out the borders of the contamination plume. Only troubles followed. First off– each group was limited to only a dozen test wells. There was no way the whole town could be covered. Second– at least one of the wells gave an unexpected result. If a group tested well 22, they would have been thrown off. Third, exactly how do you draw a border, anyway? You interpolate a line, but even after learning what interpolate means, actually doing it was a subject of some debate among group members. It was very fun to eavesdrop on those conversations.
Once each group made their line on a paper map, they used an iPad to make a line on a virtual map, using an app called Educreation. That made it easy to project each map for comparison to the map done by the professional hydrologists. Some were close, some…not so close.
The next Fruitvale activity is to learn about clean-up options, and prepare for a role to play in the town meeting to decide which clean-up option is best.
Wow! How can one blog post cover two weeks of school? That’s what happens when we have holidays.
Classes worked to test the waters of Fruitvale to determine where the highest amount of contamination is. We had to follow real-life protocols. Wells can’t be drilled just anywhere– like under buildings, for example. Also, test wells are expensive and Fruitvale, like any town, has to hold to a budget. In our case, Fruitvale could afford to hire a company to drill up to twelve wells. Testing in drill lots of threes, each lab group acted like a company, choosing where to drill and refining their hypotheses for the next lot of three.
This lab gets a big teacher thumbs up. I always enjoy testing the waters. In every class, students mentioned that they enjoyed the action too.
Next, each lab group will map their data to try to figure out where the highest contamination is, and in which direction the contamination plume is moving. Once everyone is done, we’ll compare their plumes to those generated by the professionals.
The week before Thanksgiving, we suspended Fruitvale activity for some special events. Eighth graders wrote discussion questions for a movie called “What’s on Your Plate,” that explored many of the food issues we have been studying in English and science this fall. The eighth graders led the discussion for the whole middle school on Tuesday afternoon, before break.
We also had a visit from the Honey Queen and Princess, who gave a presentation about bee keeping and the honey industry. Almost all honey comes from small producers, and bees are unique as a wild animal that can produce a domestic product. For much of early American life, honey would have been the sweetest substance anyone ever tasted.
Finally, we also looked at the e-edition of the 2012-2013 Science Symposium Handbook. Hard copies will be arriving soon– and it is now time to think of projects for this year’s symposium.
Once there was a town, with the idyllic name of Fruitvale. The town had a school, a park, some farms, an agricultural chemical company, a dry creek bed, and a problem. Some of the wells, used by only a few families, may be contaminated. Finding out if they are contaminated, and what they are contaminated with, is one problem. Finding out how far the contamination has moved and deciding what to do about it, is another problem. We’ll be trying to solve all those problems over the next class periods.
Contamination or pollution can fall into two general patterns. Area source pollution covers a wide area, but in a very diffuse, dilute or thinly spread out way. Point source pollution follows a different pattern. If the pollution comes from one point, that usually means there has been a spill of some type. The contamination has high concentration at the spill and the concentration becomes less as we move further from the spill. Another feature of a point source is that the contamination may only move in one direction, while area sources often seem to have no particular direction.
Some classes had time to draw contamination plumes on maps to compare the two types. Other classes will do this in the next lab.
Earlier in the week, the 8th grade presented their fabulous mult-genre projects about a crop plant. On a day when the weather threatened, and some students went home early, we had a cozy group in the middle school learning commons, presenting the work they created over the past few weeks. Both science and English teachers were very pleased with the outcomes.
We are starting to feel back to normal after Sandy.
When analyzing water, among other things, we use very small units of measurement to explain the amount of a substance dissolved in the water. The concentration of a substance dissolved in water may be so small that it is invisible.
Thinking of small amounts as parts of a whole makes it easier. We began these classes by comparing examples of quantities that either represented a million or a billion or a millionth or a billionth. There is a vast difference between the very large and the very small represented. By looking at examples on cards and trying to decide the quantity represented, most students conceived intuitively that the amounts ending in the “th” were parts of a whole.
We also learned how solutions are described. Usually lab solutions are named in terms of their concentration as parts per hundred, or percent. So, a 10% salt solution is 10% salt by weight and 90% water by weight. Solutions, if not named otherwise, can be assumed to be made of water. Water, the most common substance on the planet, is also the universal solvent. Conveniently, and as a standard, a gram of water takes up a milliliter of space. So, for water, and only water, we can measure water in milliliters, even when making a solution by weight. Thank goodness– weighing liquids is not fun.
Moving to the lab we made a serial dilution of food dye. We started with a 10% solution of dye and diluted by 10% eight more times. In which cup did the liquid first appear to be colorless? Was there actually any dye in the colorless cups?
We live on the water planet. But just how much of that water is available for drinking?
Not very much.
Lab groups started with a liter of water, and then poured amounts into other containers. Each amount represented a percent of water stored on earth:
1L represents all water on Earth
970 ml represents water in oceans. This is the vast majority.
30 ml represents all freshwater. Of that 30ml:
25.6ml represents ice caps and glaciers, 4ml represents groundwater and 2 drops represents surface water
Of all the water on Earth, a mere 4.4 ml represents what is available for all human needs.
After photographing their demonstrations, students read about what we use the freshwater resource for. The big surprise? More freshwater is used for irrigation and manufacturing than for drinking and sanitation.
Given the amount of water sitting in irrigation canals, students designed ways to prevent evaporation from the canals. We hope to be able to construct some of the inventions.
