Life, or Something Like It...

Today we collected water samples from the ponds in front of Castalia in hopes of finding some pond life. Our homework for the afternoon is to visit the Pond Life Identification Kit and the Smallest Page on the Web and choose three organisms from three different groups to draw and describe. The descriptions on the page are in short phrases, but since I'll be reading your descriptions they need to be in complete sentences. The information in your description should be information for identification.

Example: Water fleas can be almost six millimeters in length; you can barely see them with your naked eye. They have two large antennae that look like arms which they use to move through the water. They have a single, really dark eye. They look sort of like tiny penguins with arms like Frankenstein's Monster.

You need to go through this process for three organisms. If you get a spare moment take a look at the microscopy site by Mr. Lazaroff that shows you how to make wet mount slides, which we'll be doing tomorrow. I can't wait to see what you learn.

Water Cycle Movies

Now that we've seen my rather pathetic attempt at directing a short film, its time for the real stars to come out. Today students began brainstorming and storyboarding ideas for a 1-2 minute film on the water cycle that they will be making over the next week or so. Their ideas are already better than mine. We'll be making short movies on various topics all year, so this is a chance to learn the process and get our feet wet, pun intended.
Everyone was so excited that about a minute after I introduced the project, a student yelled "We're ready!!" and grabbed 2 cameras off my desk. But we're not going to start shooting anything until at least Friday and I can already see some students champing at the bit.
So ask your favorite student about their movie idea. I hope you'll get an earful.

Proof to support my hypothesis...

I told parents last night that their kids were awesome--I offer evidence in favor of my argument. 5th graders designed their own experiment to disprove my idea that somehow water leaks through pores in the glass, or crawls over the edges of the glass in microscopic trails to escape to the outside.



6th graders had 3 minutes to design, script, and shoot a short film that demonstrates the water cycle. I think they did a great job in the time that I allotted them. I love how "runoff" does the running man in the background the whole time.

Parent Night Information

I thought it would be nice to provide some of the info needed for parent night online instead of handing out 45 copies of 3 or 4 documents. There are three things that you all might need to look at over the course of the year--the 6th grade science syllabus, a short letter to the parents of 6th graders, and our class rules and procedures. Just click on one of the links above to get them from Google docs.

Whoops!!

When blogger says "Are you sure you want to delete?" it would be best to always say "no."

Accidentally deleted my blog a few minutes ago. Silly mistake.