Fossilizing and Mating….

This week we worked with fossils. We began the day by visiting the fossils in the basement of math and science building (which btw I never knew existed) then we went upstairs and pretended we were paleontologist’s and dug up some fossils that our wonderful mentor David buried for us.

This is the our “construction site” where some construction workers found some mammoth teeth so they called us in to dig up the area.

This is the first fossil Nicholle found!

The one I found!

Kelsey’s find!

And Dani’s find!

These are all the fossils we found. We are pretty good! 😉

After we dug up fossils we made our own trace fossils in some clay that David made.
These first pictures are of my groups fossil. In case you didn’t know these are bear tracks!

The next one is the other groups bird tracks.

After this we moved into “mating” we each made a creature, whatever kind we wanted it didn’t have to be real, and then we had a partner and together we had to make the “baby” that would be produced if our two animals mated. These pictures are of mine and Nicholle’s creatures.

These first three are of mine. She is a platadilerexsorus. She is a combination if a platypus, crocodile, T-Rex, and stegasorus.

This is Nicholle’s creature. His name is chaogre.

This is the result of our two creatures mating!

Pretty cute little family if I do say so myself! Today was a lot of fun! 😃

Tsunami and Gas videos

These videos are from earlier weeks. I have forgotten to post them until now but here they are.

Cabbage rainbow!

Today we boiled cabbage and mixed it with hydrochloric acid and vinegar to see it change color. The acid made it turn pink because it was acidic and the vinegar also made it turn pink because is was acidic. Then we used baking soda which made it turn blue because it was basic.

we then put some in a tube and blew in it to see if our breath would change it. It kind of did it made the water bluer because it was basic.

They told me it was supposed to turn pink and when it didn’t after thirty minutes if blowing I gave up. This picture is me being defeated by cabbage water!

Gasy experience

This week we worked with gases and different chemicals to make gases and see how they react with fire and how other things react with each other.

This is yeast and warm water. Eventually the gases being produced will inflate the balloon.

These are hydrochloric acid and zinc. The gases filled the balloon.

I blew up this balloon and we put zinc in it and mixed it with oxygen when we lit it it exploded there was an actual explosion we saw the fire and everything. It was really cool.

We put the egg shell in Vinegar and the other in hydrochloric acid to see which one would dissolve the eggshell. The hydrochloric one made it float and started dissolving the egg shell.

We are starting to make rock candy flavored with mints.

Tsunami week

I forgot to add these photos. We were working on waves and experimenting with the different waves like sound Waves and light waves these photos show items we used to make the waves to see how they looked and how they felt.

  This is an example of the waves our mentors drew on the board so we could discuss the differences between types of waves.

  We took a long spring and stretched it across the room so that we could see the waves move. We did both sound and light waves resprsentations. We looked at compressed and non compressed waves.

  You cant see it very well but this the spring. It was stretched from the girl in the black at one end of the room to the girl in pink at the other end.

 We tested water waves using this bucket of water.

We used a tuning fork to put in the water to see how the vibrations set off the waves in the water.

Meeting the staff

This last Thursday we went to an all campus staff luncheon. We had a display set up and we met with staff members to tell them what we have been doing. They all seems really interested and excited that we have been working in this project. Many of them asked for the links to our blogs so they could read them. It was a really fun experience to share with the school the projects we have been working on and see their reactions.

The first picture is of our board we had set up and the second picture is everyone who was there to talk with the staff.

NASA Education Grant Weeks 1-3

I have been volunteering my Monday and Wednesday afternoons helping the education department and the Science department who recently received a grant from NASA to work on educating educators in ways they can do experiments in the classrooms and helping to make educators excited about Science so that we can help our students to be excited about Science. The last three weeks have been really fun. We started with making structures out of various items to withstand an earthquake. 

This is an example of the structure my group made.

This is the group who made the structure.  Kelsey, Nicholle, Myself and our science group mentor Sarah

The second week we worked on Volcanoes. I will post pictures as I get them from Maggie, one of our Science Mentors.

This week we are working on Tsunamis, I am learning that making lessons on Tsunamis is hard. I will post these pictures from this week after Wednesday.