Looking up and keeping busy…
We have seen many great things in the sky the past few days—giant rainbows, the full moon, plenty of sunshine, even a bald eagle glided above us this week while we were out doing PSD. The lack of snow is troubling but tolerable. What are we going to do??
We have been investigating chromatography in science. First we separated black ink in several pens to find evidence against the thief who stole “Solution X” for the lab—Solution X was rumored to be the cure for the common cold but many scientists think it is a batch of bologna—just vinegar and lemon juice. Well, Freddie’s fingerprints were all over it and his pen matched the ransom note so; he’s going to trial… Our chromatograms were great and the different pens have an amazing range of mixed colors. Our next imaginary scenario involved testing “Dragon Blood” samples and looking for magical healing properties in different samples. Lastly, each student made his/her own color recipe with food coloring and groups of students separated the colors and tried to guess each other’s recipe. It has been a good study of the way different molecules separate because of their special properties—some dyes cling to water and travel up with the solvent and other pigments stick to the paper. We discussed the variables that make each results slightly different. We saw some excellent examples of varying results with the same tests.
In math we made a puzzle/game called The Tower of Hanoi or sometimes referred to as “the end of the world puzzle”. A French mathematician invented it in 1883 when he was inspired by an old myth. The story tells of some Hindu monks who were charged to move 64 graduated disks from one post to another but they could not place a larger disk on top of a smaller one. It was said that once the monks had moved the 64 disks the world would end. Our model puzzles have 8 disks and it takes 255 moves to move this small tower. We looked at the exponential growth for each added disk and figured that it would take over 580 billion years for the monks to complete their task! No need to worry… The world will not end any time soon. The function is
x= 2 to the power of x - 1. (this blog will not publish the exponent). Together, we figured it out and wow, how those exponents really make a number grow! This is a great math/ game connection and everyone is really good at solving the puzzle with 8 disks.
In Literacy we are studying poems using personification as imagery to make things come “alive”. We are also writing our own poems with personification. This is a fun playful style of writing that is very enjoyable. Students are also learning how to write and correctly punctuate dialogue. Fourth graders are in the planning stage of creating a mystery story. These stories will have several characters and, of course, include some dialogue.
Tuesday winter sports are over but we have hardly begun to ski here on campus. I am looking forward to getting some snow (hopefully) and working on those XC ski skills. This is a very strong group of skiers and we are anxious to get back out on the fields. Until then, we will keep physically training and playing games for fun.
Signing off, mystery fans—
Emily
