Singing About Cells!

This is my personal favorite cell song.  It really helps me remember all of the cell organelles and their functions.  Give it a listen!

Plant Cells, Up Close and Personcell ;)

 Take a look at some onion cells as seen by the students through the microscope today.  What do you notice about them?

All about rainbows podcast!

Listen to this podcast from RadioLab all about where color/light comes from and how our eyes interpret it! Take a listen

Yummy Gummy Bear Lab

Here are some images of our gummy bear lab that we did this past wednesday.  We are able to see evidence of reflection, absorption and transmission, 3 properties of light we are focusing on this unit.  

 Yummy lab equipment!!

The red laser shines through the red gummy bears demonstrating transmission.  Some of the red laser light is also reflecting or bouncing off of the gummies causing them to glow!

The red laser seems to stop right when it hits the green gummy bears demonstrating absorption; light being sucked in!

Tutoring Hours

Tutoring this Wednesday 9/11/13 3:35 - 4:30 in preparation for Friday's quiz and notebook check!

Refraction in Action

 Today was a stellar lab day all about the property of light- refraction. Look at some of the cool activities we did demonstrating the bending of light!

Observing refraction: white light bending into all of the colors of the rainbow (Roy G. Biv)

Rainbows coming off of a flashlight and prism

Look at light bending as the water falls out of the hole in our container

Observing refraction: light from the laser is bent as the water falls from the container hitting a student's finger

Observing refraction: the light bends as it enters the water making the straws appear bent or broken

Laser Maze!

A miss.......

A direct hit!

Great teamwork and collaboration was shown last week with our Laser Maze activity.  We mastered the protractor and used what we learned about reflection, angle of incidence and the angle of reflection to bounce a laser between two mirrors and hit a target.  A job well done!

End of Light Unit Coming Quickly!

Reminder: There will be an end of unit test and your notebooks will be collected this friday!

Since this week is all about properties of light, in particular reflection and refraction, I found this BBC article particularly fascinating.

The article is all about a skyscraper in England called the "walkie talkie" building.  This building's windows are at the perfect angle to reflect sunlight in a concentrated beam right at the street below.  Find out what happened by clicking the link below!

A skyscraper that melted a car with reflection!