Maddy's Elementary Science Methods II Blog

 Lab: This week in Lab we worked to create a realistic and to scale timeline of the creation of the universe all the way up until today. We divided our timeline into 14 meters to have 1 meter represent a billion years. Before we got to find out when humans, animals, and plants all appeared on Earth, we placed our initial individual guesses on the timeline so that we can see how that differed from when these things actually appeared/came to be. It was actually crazy to see how close dinosaurs, the first land animals, first land plants, humans, and the creation of the moon were in our timeline. I feel like in all our our educations, we would make these timelines but they weren't up to scale and they didn't accurately represent the amount of time between each of these milestones. Lecture: Exam Textbook: History of the Earth I learned that the Earth was almost entirely ice at least 3 times in it's history. I remember reading about one of these event's briefly but didn't...

Lab:  Ted: Origin of the Universe About 13.7 billion years ago there was something that happened, everything came into existence, atomic structure to gravitational pulls, atoms coming together and making bodies that we see planets, stars, mass comes into play, it took about 300 thousand years to create light.  The initial universe was super super hot. It has been cooling down ever since. The universe has been expanding and that expansion is slowing down.  People tell you that the big bang and the creation of the earth are the same thing but you are missing 9 million years if that is what you think.  Scientists are backing up the creation of the universe with 10 to the negative 43? - 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000001 (43 zeros) - they are hunting it down and trying to figure it out Lifecycle of the Stars:  Stars aren’t actually twinkling - just appear like that due to how light comes through The long process of creating a star Stars travel and they travel...

Lab:      Today in lab we built our own model of the beginning of the solar system, including the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Earth's moon, and Mars. We had to scale it to size but make it small enough that we didn't have to leave the building. We were allowed to use our resources and went to google to start finding out how big the plants were so that we could scale it down to something we could actually make. We were running into a bit of trouble figuring out how to scale the size and distance down so that it was possible for us to make. Ted gave us a website called Exploratorium where we could enter in how big our sun was, and it would scale the other planets diameter and orbit size accordingly so that we could make our model a bit easier. It took us until the last second to get it done but seeing the size difference between our perception of the distance between planets vs. the actual distance, connecting back to misconceptions we have that were never addressed and cor...

Lab:      This week in lab we discussed the basics of astrology seeing what we all remembered about the Earth's orbit as well as how the seasons change and explaining the moons phases. It was interesting to see how little I remembered about these concepts as I feel like we talked about them so much from kindergarten to ninth grade, but after that point the learning switched to biology, chemistry, and physics ultimately affecting the retention of this knowledge.  Lecture: In lecture, we went over the phases of the moon as well as how the seasons change making sure that we can lock the concept in before we move on. I really liked the models that were used in lecture when explaining the Earth's tilt as well as how the tilt affects where the tropic lines are at. We also talked about how the North Pole is always pointing to the North star, which is again something I didn't know. I also learned that it's possible to have 2 full moons in one month. I didn't know that was p...