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.