My Science Homework

Today, we took a short quiz over the final units of the meteorology section of our class. These quizzes will be graded over the weekend and grades updated my early next week.
We then watched another 15 minutes or so of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”. Students were again encouraged to jot down notes […]

The final unit of the year: Climate change. We will be spending several days studying the climate change debate from the scientific viewpoint. We began by discussing the history of climate change on the earth. In a nutshell: the earth’s climate is indeed changing and it always has been. What sets the current changes apart […]

Yesterday’s lab was designed mainly to get students accustomed to working with the stream tables and simply observing the flow of water over the Earth’s surface.  Today’s lab involved more detailed concepts, including observing closely where erosion and deposition will occur in a meandering river, where the best places would be to construct buildings as […]

After gaining a solid understanding of the terminology used to describe watersheds, students worked in pairs to complete the first part of a two-day lab on riverbed erosion.
Today’s lab focused on simply observing a river channel, blocking the river channel with a dam or levee, and observing how such structures break down with time.  Tomorrow […]

As a means of getting ready for tomorrow’s stream table lab on the development and evolution of streams and rivers, students worked individually to read section 15.2 from the Earth Science text on watersheds.  The secdtion review (#1-7, 9) was completed in class and is due at the start of tomorrow’s class period.
Homework:  Complete the […]

What evidence exists that the continents of the Earth have drifted around on the globe over the past several million years? Today, we examined three main pieces of evidence: the fossil record, rock & climate records, and glaciers.
All three of these objects leave significant evidence that the continents were once connected and have since drifted […]

Today’s objective: To learn how geologists determine the epicenter of an earthquake. The process is remarkably easy and after viewing some of the specifics in a brief, 7-minute video clip, students then worked in cooperative pairs to complete a lab utilizing data from various cities seismograph records to determine the epicenter of an […]

As we aim to complete our work on the geology unit over the coming week, students worked in cooperative pairs of their choosing to complete the “The Fossil Record” guide with help from the text.  We also discussed the importance and differences between several types of fossil specimens that were passed around the room.
Next week […]

We began today’s class by reviewing the absolute aging concepts covered in yesterday’s class period. We did this by going through the solutions for each of the four assigned problems that were part of last night’s homework. Students were allowed to keep the practice problem set and were encouraged to reference it for […]

After wrapping up work on determining the relative age of rock layers using the principle of superposition and recreating cross sections of rock layers, students were introduced today to the concept of absolute aging: determining the quantitative age of a rock layer or fossil.
These methods incorporate the principles of radiometric dating: the use […]