Maddy's Elementary Science Methods II Blog

Lab: Climate is a 30-year average - if weather is my moon then climate is my personality Climate change is 99.9% human-caused.  If we are talking about climate change then it has to happen over time, a weathering event like snowing in June is not considered climate change. To teach climate change you have to make it personal or else your brain does NOT care Have to make it personal: IOWA Driving Question: is the Goldfinch, Iowa’s state bird, in danger, and how do we know? What could we measure?  Going to collect and record data Quiz - use data to tell us if Goldfinch is in danger - but have to relate it directly to our data.  Measuring and Mapping Precipitation in Iowa: We want to determine how the number of days with heavy rainfall has changed over time? What does heavy rainfall mean? How many inches of rain is considered “heavy” - more than 1.5 inches in a day DSM Centerville Indianola Row Avg. Avg. of First 5 years 2.8 days 6 days 2.6 days 3.8 days Avg. of Last 5 years...

Lab In lab we started by talking about the law of superposition... everyones fav! This law basically states that the older stuff is at the bottom and the longest is at the top. We used this to work to place different layers of rock in order from oldest to youngest based off different photos. Immediately, I was taken back to my ninth grade earth and space science class and I could remember doing exactly what we were doing in lab, but back in early high school... props to Ms. Howlett :)  Then we moved into talking about different characteristics that sand from different places had. We looked closely at sand from beaches, dunes, and rivers around the world. Our group decided to look at each group and write down observations about each sample. All of the different rock types were from different areas and all had different colors, were different shapes, and just looked different. We came up with some characteristics for sand found in rivers, dunes, and beach's.  River Sand Characte...

Lab In lab this week we worked to create different types of rocks including sedimentary, metamorphic, and igneous rocks. To do this, we used different colored starburst to represent different material being mixed together and used different methods to do so. The igneous rocks are hot and cool and some metamorphic rocks are created from heat but not melting, so we used both a candle and torch to mimic the heating of the rocks. For the sedimentary rocks we squished them together using different amounts of pressure to create the different types of rocks. We also used a bit of heat to cement the materials together.  Lecture Earth/Volcanoes On fault lines Either sliding by  Pulling apart  Or smashing into each other  Earthquakes in the US Due to fracking  Unstabilizing the Earth Plate Tectonics When plates smash together we get mountains Two kinds of plates When two of the same type of plates hit each other, they create a set of mountains If they’re opposite they cre...

 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...