On Thursday, we’ll be taking our test on Fluid Pressure.

Here’s your chance to suggest or vote on questions to appear on the test…

Under Pressure – Google Moderator

(Sign in with your SDS Mail account to vote or suggest).

Suggesting and voting ends Wednesday at 11:00pm.

Be creative!

2 points extra credit to the first person who comments below with the correct response…

I was just walking in our carpeted hotel lobby towards the escalator. As I reached out to grab the escalator rail, I received a pretty substantial static-electric shock.

Using our studies of forces, briefly tell me why.

Greetings from sunny Los Angeles (I haven’t seen many cardigans yet, but the butterflies did fly away).

I hope you all had a great Friday and finished up on those quizzes. Let me know if you had any trouble with them.

As you know, I won’t be in class on Monday either as I’ll still be here in the Sunshine State.

**So, please make sure you have materials you need to work on your balloon racers!**

I don’t have a formal lesson for you all on Monday with Mr. Ohlmer, but I’m sure you will know how to behave yourselves etc with the freedom of the activity (right?).

I’ll be back on Tuesday (hopefully) and we’ll start doing time trials to see your progress.

Get in touch if you have any questions over the weekend. I have my laptop, iPhone, Skype, Facebook, Twitter etc.

Good luck!

Here are the texts we’re reading from Newton’s Principia…

January 11-12, 2010: 3 Laws and Intro

I’ll be updating these daily as we make our way through this revolutionary book!

If you’d like to take a peek at the whole Principia, here’s a link to a full text on Google Books that you can read online or download as a PDF to your Kindle/phone/iTouch.

Or for you Latin geeks… you can try reading Principia in its original language, Latin!

And here’s the Principia on Archive.org (it’s a little easier to read than Google Books in my opinion).

Enjoy!

This week we are studying Newton and his 3 famous laws of motion.

They are incredibly interesting and incredibly revolutionary for how humanity understands the universe.

–

SO, your assignment is to (1) research, (2) explain and (3) demonstrate Newton’s 3 Laws to a 6th grader (which you will be doing and they will be grading you).

You can present your explanation as…

Powerpoint
Video
Blog (create a blog… blogger.com, Wordpress.com or Facebook note)
Podcast

This is due Friday and WORTH 10 POINTS!

Check out the assignments calendar and you’ll see that the Journal Article due date has been moved to Friday December 4, 2009 and will count as part of your exam grade.

That is due to the web being down at school today and the possibility that it will be down more this week.

In the meantime, we’ll be working on our intro to energy (which is a bridge to what we are studying in the Spring).

See you tomorrow!

Some of you need more time for experiments, so I’m extending the final due date for the Journal Article to Friday Nov 13th. So, the Journal Article Research Prep Guide will be due on Thurs Nov 12th.

This is all changed on our class assignment calendar as well.

Let me know what you think in the comments here or over on the GriffinScience Facebook page.

By now, you should have accumulated some information regarding your journal article (due next Wednesday, btw). You should understand the basics of your topic and have an idea where your research is taking you.

So, please respond to this email with your status.

- Worth 30 Points as a Test Grade
- Please use complete sentences with proper grammar, punctuation and spelling. Google Docs does have spell check.
- What have you accomplished so far?
- What still needs to be done?
- What are you going to do over the weekend to help you gain forward progress?

There is no set length for your response. I’ll be grading you based on how well you’ve used your time and how well you understand your topic at this point (which will vary from person to person, of course).

This is due back to me by midnight tonight and will be the final grade on your progress report for the 2nd Quarter (parent conferences next Wednesday).

Here is the calendar of due dates for the Journal of Middle School Science we are working on for the next two weeks.

You can view the calendar by month (default), week or Agenda (handy).

I’ll be adding all future assignments to this calendar as well. So, you can add this calendar to your own SDS calendar and stay up to date (see me if you need help on this). The calendar will always be available in the “Cal” tab up in the menu bar at the top.

Let me know if you need any help figuring this out as it will be really helpful for you since we all have our SDS Google accounts now!