Grade Reports on Tuesday

Students received progress reports today from their other teachers, but will not receive one from me until Tuesday. They will be taking a re-quiz on Monday and will have a new grade from that for Tuesday so expect to see them then. I had problems with my grading program on Thursday night so I was not able to update grades when I had hoped. I hope to input more recent grades tomorrow (Saturday) so you can check the "parent portal" on Sunday and see them for sure. More about next week, coming soon.

Weekly Update Nov. 26th - 30th

This week students will be working on the second part of their energy conservation lab. They will be using equations for kinetic and potential energy to analyze the motion of a marble on a "roller coaster". This will be an important topic as they complete their semester project that will ask them to work in a group to create a 2 meter long marble roller coaster.

The quiz we took week before last will be handed back this week and most students will make corrections on Wednesday. They will be able to retake this quiz to replace their previous grade. Some students still have to make some retakes from the last test, so make sure students have scheduled a time to review with me and are ready for the retake when it is time.

Weekly Update Friday, Nov. 16th

The recent on-line assignment has increased traffic and awareness of the class blog. I would like to establish a habit of giving a weekly update on Fridays for the rest of the year. This is a tall order for me, but I know students will benefit from having consistent reminders and updates that may have been overlooked during class.

The purpose of the weekly reminder is to highlight the key aspects of the past week of class and to look ahead to the activities or challenges the next week may provide.

From the past week, students had the treat of traveling to the Carter Center with Mr. Billingsley and Miss Shepherd. This gave us one less day to review the pulley lab and analyze the data, but we worked in class to make sense of how the pulley works. The end of the week was a reality check for us all as we tried to explain how the pulley provides a mechanical advantage and how it does work by taking a quiz.

This next week will take us into a new topic of study as we move toward calculating potential and kinetic energy. We have two days, over which we will be reading the textbook to gain key information about types of energy, and we will be using a new piece of lab equipment that demonstrate the physics involved in a roller coaster.

Air Track momentum transfer simulation

Click here for the Air Track simulator.
http://www.sciencejoywagon.com/explrsci/media/airtrack.htm

Homework 11/9/07

This week we made a word wall during our lessons on momentum and movement (click on the photo above to make it bigger and easier to read). The right side of the word wall is filled with physics terms that relate to momentum. The left side shows some of the key terms for movement that we learned in class. For your assignment PICK ONE OF THE FOLLOWING and e-mail Mr. Boettcher with your response:

Option 1: Pick 2 of the physics terms and 2 of the movement terms from the board and connect each of them to something you did in class during our movement lessons on momentum. You should give at least one complete sentence for each word.

Option 2: Most of the physics terms are congruent with at least one movement term. Write a sentence that describes how a certain physics term relates to a movement term. Do this for THREE pairs of words. For example, I think the word "space" in movement is like "mass" in physics because anything with mass has matter which is positive space.

Option 3: Watch the video of the momentum study and describe in complete sentences:
*how they showed one moment of no momentum
*how they showed velocity affecting momentum
*how they showed mass affecting momentum
In this option you are encouraged to use "action" words like 'slide', 'roll', or 'bend'.

This assignment is due as an e-mail by Wednesday, November 14th.