Hey, this is my 3rd day observation. I came to class today, and I noticed, that the crystals didn't really grow where i expected them to grow, but they actually grew on the mud. It isn't what i expected, but it looks really nice even though it is very hard to see. My borax solution, isn't showing any progress and my sugar is slowly going. I put the bushes into a pool of sugar solution so I am hoping that the crystals will show. Nothing much happened so this is all I have to say. My next post will hopefully come tomorrow
Monday, January 31, 2011
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Volcanoes and Plate Tectonics
In class, 6b was assigned to read an article about volcanoes and boundaries, and answer some questions that where included in the sheet. I took notes in my notebook and answer the questions in this post. These are some of the questions and their answers:
What symbols are used to represent volcanoes? (There was a specific map on the page we had to answer this question with.)
Active volcanoes are showed as a triangle on the map, but they only show the active ones.
What other symbols are shown on the map?
If I look close, I can see that they used a black and thick line to represent plate boundaries, and they also named the continents.
Where are most of Earth's volcanoes formed?
From the information I read, and can see on the map, they mostly form near borders of the plate boundaries.
Observing, what regions have a large number of volcanoes?
From my point of view, Asia has a lot of volcanoes near the borders, North America has an okay amount also including South America, in Europe I can see a small but still some amount of volcanoes, and last Africa has few around the plate tectonic.
What is a volcano?
A volcano is a sculpture of rock/sediment and magma that is produced by the heat and materials from the upper mantle.
There might have been some more questions, but I thought these were the best ones to share with you. I have learned a lot about volcanoes only through a 4 paged packed and hope it will help me in life.
What symbols are used to represent volcanoes? (There was a specific map on the page we had to answer this question with.)
Active volcanoes are showed as a triangle on the map, but they only show the active ones.
What other symbols are shown on the map?
If I look close, I can see that they used a black and thick line to represent plate boundaries, and they also named the continents.
Where are most of Earth's volcanoes formed?
From the information I read, and can see on the map, they mostly form near borders of the plate boundaries.
Observing, what regions have a large number of volcanoes?
From my point of view, Asia has a lot of volcanoes near the borders, North America has an okay amount also including South America, in Europe I can see a small but still some amount of volcanoes, and last Africa has few around the plate tectonic.
What is a volcano?
A volcano is a sculpture of rock/sediment and magma that is produced by the heat and materials from the upper mantle.
There might have been some more questions, but I thought these were the best ones to share with you. I have learned a lot about volcanoes only through a 4 paged packed and hope it will help me in life.
Friday, January 28, 2011
Day 2 Observation
Hello, it's me again, Alex, if you are not sure what I am going to be talking about, please check my previous post. Well, anyhow this is my day 2 observation, and yes I have noticed some really cool changes. This is my garden:
It might not be as clear, but on the orange bush,i noticed some white crystals growing. Also, on the blue clay statue, you can see that there is a small dot of white crystals, I am not sure how that got there because I didn't put anything on my first day or the one when I was starting. Mostly, I noticed that on the left side, there is a big blop of blue solution, it is not as clear for you because it did not fit in the whole picture. I guess that someone touched my garden or it was shaken because my toothpicks fell out of the dirt, as you can see. Other wise nothing has changed. Thank you for reading and I hope that if you ever make a crystal garden, it will go just ad well as by mine. Tomorrow I will write my 3rd observation
It might not be as clear, but on the orange bush,i noticed some white crystals growing. Also, on the blue clay statue, you can see that there is a small dot of white crystals, I am not sure how that got there because I didn't put anything on my first day or the one when I was starting. Mostly, I noticed that on the left side, there is a big blop of blue solution, it is not as clear for you because it did not fit in the whole picture. I guess that someone touched my garden or it was shaken because my toothpicks fell out of the dirt, as you can see. Other wise nothing has changed. Thank you for reading and I hope that if you ever make a crystal garden, it will go just ad well as by mine. Tomorrow I will write my 3rd observation
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
A garden
Since last week, the class of 2011,science 6b, were working on garden. You must be wondering, how can 6th graders build gardens...and you are right, we can't except for some very talented ones. All we had to actually do, was make a small 3dimensional garden. We had to use materials that we could find and we had to make sure that nothing in our garden was alive. I used: straw, branches,dirt, pops tickle sticks, glue, cotton, straws and some more. I could only find a shoe box to do my experiment in so that's what I used. This is going to be my diary where I kind of write every day my observations and what I see changing. Coming to class on the 26th of January, was my first day of observations....I must be honest though, and by the 26th I only had my garden ready to put the solutions on so it could produce crystals. The whole "unit" was practically called make a crystal garden. I am not sure yet how crystals will form out of water mixed with some solid but that is what the whole project is about. Anyways, we could pick salt solution, Epsom salt solution, sugar solution, borax and mono A.P(not sure what it stands for) I started with putting borax onto my so called "straw stick" which represent flowers growing on wood sticks, and around the straw was a thin yellow rope. I forgot to mention that we could also use food coloring to make the crystals all different colors. My borax was red and I covered all the yellows strings red. Next, I took sugar and added blue color to it. I cut a little cup of plastic in the middle, powered the the sugar solution in. Finally I put the "bush" inside and now it is resting in the box, hopefully forming crystals. I also included cotton pillows in my garden, and I was meant to put Epsom salt on them but accidentally I put blue borax, anyways, it looks very interesting. I put normal salt on some other 3 bushes made out of thick curling string and last, I put Epsom salt on the edges of my box. This was my day one. For my next post, I will include a picture so you get a clearer idea of what I was talking about. SO after all, today was a very fun day and I always learned something about crystals.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Dynamic Earth
In the last week, 6B has been studying about the Earth, but not only basic facts, they were digging into the history of everything. They got an assignment which was to read a site, answer some questions and reflect on everything they learned. Luckily, I was in that class so I will be explaining what we did and what I found out. I remember we had a substitute the day we got this assignment. She said it was due that day we started. The first time I looked at the site I was shocked, there were millions of pages and I she clearly said we had to read everything. By the end of class no one finished reading so she said we could get an extra day. Just for our luck, our original teacher came back the next day, and she stated that we didn't have to read the whole websites due that day. She allowed us to work on it in class, and finish a reflection or article about it due a specific Thursday. There were a lot of different sections to the web. And so I began.
My first topic I looked at was:
Rocks and Mining
I found out that: every man and woman uses about 10,000 Kg of rocks every year for various reasons. I did know that houses take up a lot of concrete and rocks, but I didn't know that they take up 4000,000 Kg of gravel and concrete, but that also depends on the house. SO before I started studying this, I came up with some questions, and I answered few. For example, I asked myself where rocks come from, and I found out that they come from underground water, caves and they are found by digging and mining. And also including a bit of minerals in my next sentence, every rock is made for a different reason and contains a different material. Rocks also help scientist because they help them discover history with the minerals they posses. Some minerals that are found in rocks are: Orthoclase, Biotite, Quartz, Plagiollase and Gneiss. Some rocks can even tell us what has been on them or what happened. For example you may sometimes see rain drops, steps of animals, prints from a meteorite, lightning and so on. I think that every single piece of information is very useful but hard to remember. In this section, it mostly talked about different types of rocks and how we can distinguish them.
Inner Earth
I have talked about this before, but now I will just include fact that are new to me. As we know, the Earth is made out of the inner core, outer core,inner mantle, outer mantle, and the crust.
The inner core, is dense molten iron and solid matter. The mantle, is lighter silicate liquid. And the crust is partial melting of the mantle.The crust is also only as thick as an apples skin. That is what amazed me the most.
Plate Tectonics and Volcanoes
How can we learn about Earth from clues of meteorites, rocks,diamonds, earthquakes etc.?
Meteorites help us understand about different materials and what is going on in space. Diamonds mostly give scientist clues from the upper mantle and remind others about high temperature forming. Scientist are mostly interested in studying the carbon atoms in diamonds. I made my diamond cycle including true facts of how diamonds came to be. Some of the things include answers to: How do diamonds come to Earth? Where do they form? So first of all, diamonds come out from volcanoes and they get carried by magma and rocks. Most people believe they get created in the upper mantle. If there is some magma or rocks coming out of the surface, once the diamonds are stuck in that, it takes them only 14-15 hours to get from the mantle to the Earth's surface.
I also took some notes about earthquakes, and if you compare them with what I got the previous week, you can see that I learned tons of facts. Earthquakes are like sound waves and they travel in different speeds. Mostly they are formed in the mantle and seismic waves slow down in hot rocks and speed up in cold rocks. Even though earthquakes can be very violent, they give us a clear idea of what Earth's layer are. There are two main waves that travel. Those are the P-waves, and the S-waves. P-waves travel through liquids and solids but S-waves only travel through solids. After a lot of studying, scientist conclude that for know we know, that when plates collide they form and earthquake or a small mountain. There is also such thing as an under water earthquake which is pretty much like a normal earthquake except it is formed under water and it causes water to rise up.
One of the sections to read was bout Volcanoes. I didn't gather as much information from that but I got just enough to not make you bored.Volcanoes are formed by the same heat that drives Earth's plates. Volcanoes aren't always as violent as others, and that all depends on the plate tectonic it is found on. A volcano is formed of a lot of sections. For example: pyroclastic flow, old tephra, summit crater, new tephra, flank vents, young lava flows and the cantral conduit.
Gems and Minerals
When I first started reading this section of the web, I was a bit confused because I didn't understand everything, but now I know pretty much everything I will tell you and I hope you will understand as well. First of all, I found out that only about 15 different minerals are commonly used gemstones. As you will read from under, gems can be in different colors. Most diamonds are made of carbon and are mostly yellow or brown, the other colors are only found in every 100,000 diamonds.
Then, there is a Oppenheimer diamond:
A Red diamond:
A Blue Heart Diamond:
A Victoria-Transvaal Diamond: Second hardest mineral: corundum: aluminum oxide
A rubies diamond:
Sapphires diamond:
Emeralds: (mostly green)
Aquamarines diamonds: (mostly blue)
Opal Diamonds:
Moonstones Diamonds:
Cat's eye Diamonds:
There are also specific stones assigned to the month you were born in for example:
Jan.: Garnet
Feb.: Amethyst
March: Aquamarine
Apr.: Diamond
May: Emerald
June: Alexandrite
July: Ruby
August: Peridat
Sep.: Sapphire
Oct.: Opal
Nov.: Topaz
Dec.: Turquoise
So after all, I have had a great time reading this web even though it was very tiring and hard to work through. I learned a lot of great detail and now I know some extra information for my whole life. If you are interested in reading and watching videos about what I talked about, You can visit:
http://www.mnh.si.edu/earth/main_frames.html
My first topic I looked at was:
Rocks and Mining
I found out that: every man and woman uses about 10,000 Kg of rocks every year for various reasons. I did know that houses take up a lot of concrete and rocks, but I didn't know that they take up 4000,000 Kg of gravel and concrete, but that also depends on the house. SO before I started studying this, I came up with some questions, and I answered few. For example, I asked myself where rocks come from, and I found out that they come from underground water, caves and they are found by digging and mining. And also including a bit of minerals in my next sentence, every rock is made for a different reason and contains a different material. Rocks also help scientist because they help them discover history with the minerals they posses. Some minerals that are found in rocks are: Orthoclase, Biotite, Quartz, Plagiollase and Gneiss. Some rocks can even tell us what has been on them or what happened. For example you may sometimes see rain drops, steps of animals, prints from a meteorite, lightning and so on. I think that every single piece of information is very useful but hard to remember. In this section, it mostly talked about different types of rocks and how we can distinguish them.
Inner Earth
I have talked about this before, but now I will just include fact that are new to me. As we know, the Earth is made out of the inner core, outer core,inner mantle, outer mantle, and the crust.
The inner core, is dense molten iron and solid matter. The mantle, is lighter silicate liquid. And the crust is partial melting of the mantle.The crust is also only as thick as an apples skin. That is what amazed me the most.
Plate Tectonics and Volcanoes
How can we learn about Earth from clues of meteorites, rocks,diamonds, earthquakes etc.?
Meteorites help us understand about different materials and what is going on in space. Diamonds mostly give scientist clues from the upper mantle and remind others about high temperature forming. Scientist are mostly interested in studying the carbon atoms in diamonds. I made my diamond cycle including true facts of how diamonds came to be. Some of the things include answers to: How do diamonds come to Earth? Where do they form? So first of all, diamonds come out from volcanoes and they get carried by magma and rocks. Most people believe they get created in the upper mantle. If there is some magma or rocks coming out of the surface, once the diamonds are stuck in that, it takes them only 14-15 hours to get from the mantle to the Earth's surface.
I also took some notes about earthquakes, and if you compare them with what I got the previous week, you can see that I learned tons of facts. Earthquakes are like sound waves and they travel in different speeds. Mostly they are formed in the mantle and seismic waves slow down in hot rocks and speed up in cold rocks. Even though earthquakes can be very violent, they give us a clear idea of what Earth's layer are. There are two main waves that travel. Those are the P-waves, and the S-waves. P-waves travel through liquids and solids but S-waves only travel through solids. After a lot of studying, scientist conclude that for know we know, that when plates collide they form and earthquake or a small mountain. There is also such thing as an under water earthquake which is pretty much like a normal earthquake except it is formed under water and it causes water to rise up.
One of the sections to read was bout Volcanoes. I didn't gather as much information from that but I got just enough to not make you bored.Volcanoes are formed by the same heat that drives Earth's plates. Volcanoes aren't always as violent as others, and that all depends on the plate tectonic it is found on. A volcano is formed of a lot of sections. For example: pyroclastic flow, old tephra, summit crater, new tephra, flank vents, young lava flows and the cantral conduit.
When I first started reading this section of the web, I was a bit confused because I didn't understand everything, but now I know pretty much everything I will tell you and I hope you will understand as well. First of all, I found out that only about 15 different minerals are commonly used gemstones. As you will read from under, gems can be in different colors. Most diamonds are made of carbon and are mostly yellow or brown, the other colors are only found in every 100,000 diamonds.
Then, there is a Oppenheimer diamond:
A Victoria-Transvaal Diamond: Second hardest mineral: corundum: aluminum oxide
A rubies diamond:
Sapphires diamond:
Emeralds: (mostly green)
Aquamarines diamonds: (mostly blue)
There are also specific stones assigned to the month you were born in for example:
Jan.: Garnet
Feb.: Amethyst
March: Aquamarine
Apr.: Diamond
May: Emerald
June: Alexandrite
July: Ruby
August: Peridat
Sep.: Sapphire
Oct.: Opal
Nov.: Topaz
Dec.: Turquoise
So after all, I have had a great time reading this web even though it was very tiring and hard to work through. I learned a lot of great detail and now I know some extra information for my whole life. If you are interested in reading and watching videos about what I talked about, You can visit:
http://www.mnh.si.edu/earth/main_frames.html
Friday, January 14, 2011
Earth's crust/Caves
On the 11-13.1.11, the class of Mrs.M ( science teacher) was watching two very in interesting videos. The first one was about Earth's crust. Even before starting to watch the movie though, the students were asked to dram a diagram of the inside and the outside of the Earth. In my diagram, I drew 6 layers inside the Earth, and it was wrong.Some questions our teacher asked us were: What do you know about the structure of Earth? How does the land,water and air all interact with each other? And what is "liner Earth? Some of our answers were:
Round/Different layers/ 75% water/3 dimensional/has magma/ physical features/ natural resources/ natural resources(tornadoes,floods etc.) forces/ tides/ natural disasters etc.
So while watching the movie from Bill Nye, I found out that, the inside of the Earth is made of 4 main layers. The layers are called: the crust(on the outside) the mantle(closest to the crust) the outer core(surrounding the core) and the core(the center).Here is a picture:
The core is about 1,5000 degrees Celsius
The Outer core is iron mixed with metals
The Mantle is 1,200 degrees celsius
I also learned what a hot spring is, it is similar to a volcano except that it releases liquids not as warm. Also, I knew that plates move every year, but I had no idea that North America was moving 2cm away from Europe every day. For this, I predict that in maybe a zillion years or more, North America might appear on the other side of the Earth and and bump into Europe which might make a mountain. The last thing I learned, was that when ever there is an earthquake on one side of the Earth, you can feel it on the other side as well.
The second movie we watched, was about caves. They can be almost anywhere and in many different shapes. 2 facts that amazed me, were that the temperature in a cave is always the same, and that things in caves change very slowly. I find it amazing about the temperature because I have no idea how a cave can not freeze in the winter if it is really cold and how the temperature NEVER changes. I learned 2 new words: Stalactite and stalagmite. Both of those objects are located in the Earth. Stalactites are sculptures hanging from the top and stalagmites are sculptures from the button. They grow because of the minerals in the water.
I also learned that the animals that live in the caves, or somehow are connected to caves, have a different names. There are trogloxenes: animals that visit the caves for example bats or bears. Then there are troglyphiles: cave lovers for example worms and last, troglodytes: cave creatures and are mostly blind like fish. Bats are the main creatures that bring life to a cave. So as you can see, I learned a lot about animals, shapes and a lot more.
What I want to learn:
We were also asked to say what we want to learn. We could choose from: rocks, the rocks cycle, earth's structure, minerals, mining etc. I choose rocks and minerals. I though learning about rocks would be interesting because it involves a lot of history and there isn't just one type of rock. Also knowing how all the rocks came to be and why they aren't all the same and most of all, what makes them different. I would also like to know how rocks help us and when they where discovered. I heard about a rock cycle and it sounds really cool so I will try to find out how it works. I think learning about minerals can be exiting because you can learn what they are made of, why they help us, what they are made of and a lot more. I would of course like to learn about the other facts as well but I will mostly concentrate on those two things.
Round/Different layers/ 75% water/3 dimensional/has magma/ physical features/ natural resources/ natural resources(tornadoes,floods etc.) forces/ tides/ natural disasters etc.
So while watching the movie from Bill Nye, I found out that, the inside of the Earth is made of 4 main layers. The layers are called: the crust(on the outside) the mantle(closest to the crust) the outer core(surrounding the core) and the core(the center).Here is a picture:
The Outer core is iron mixed with metals
The Mantle is 1,200 degrees celsius
I also learned what a hot spring is, it is similar to a volcano except that it releases liquids not as warm. Also, I knew that plates move every year, but I had no idea that North America was moving 2cm away from Europe every day. For this, I predict that in maybe a zillion years or more, North America might appear on the other side of the Earth and and bump into Europe which might make a mountain. The last thing I learned, was that when ever there is an earthquake on one side of the Earth, you can feel it on the other side as well.
The second movie we watched, was about caves. They can be almost anywhere and in many different shapes. 2 facts that amazed me, were that the temperature in a cave is always the same, and that things in caves change very slowly. I find it amazing about the temperature because I have no idea how a cave can not freeze in the winter if it is really cold and how the temperature NEVER changes. I learned 2 new words: Stalactite and stalagmite. Both of those objects are located in the Earth. Stalactites are sculptures hanging from the top and stalagmites are sculptures from the button. They grow because of the minerals in the water.
I also learned that the animals that live in the caves, or somehow are connected to caves, have a different names. There are trogloxenes: animals that visit the caves for example bats or bears. Then there are troglyphiles: cave lovers for example worms and last, troglodytes: cave creatures and are mostly blind like fish. Bats are the main creatures that bring life to a cave. So as you can see, I learned a lot about animals, shapes and a lot more.
What I want to learn:
We were also asked to say what we want to learn. We could choose from: rocks, the rocks cycle, earth's structure, minerals, mining etc. I choose rocks and minerals. I though learning about rocks would be interesting because it involves a lot of history and there isn't just one type of rock. Also knowing how all the rocks came to be and why they aren't all the same and most of all, what makes them different. I would also like to know how rocks help us and when they where discovered. I heard about a rock cycle and it sounds really cool so I will try to find out how it works. I think learning about minerals can be exiting because you can learn what they are made of, why they help us, what they are made of and a lot more. I would of course like to learn about the other facts as well but I will mostly concentrate on those two things.
Monday, January 10, 2011
This lab was very interesting, doing it with my partner Sofia. It took very less time, and it was very fun. We didn't need too many materials so it was doable. I think I did very well making the two graphs because I knew how to do them immediately. I think, that me and my partner did a small mistake, because we had to add some ice during the lab which we shouldn't have. The reason why was because we messed up and we put way too less ice in.The most difficult part about this lab was observing and writing down the answers. It was so because you had to make sure you were in perfect time and that you didn't mess up counting, and that you record your data in the right spot. Also, next time I write a reflection on the lab, I can add a bit more detail or go over what I wrote and see if I am missing anything. For example, this time, I forgot to mention about the temperature.Next time I do a lab similar to this one, I will try to be a bit more focused on the work, because this time my partner and I were fooling around a bit :P Otherwise, this lab was probably the most fun lab we have done for now but also needing you to concentrate.
Making Water Wetter Reflection
If you have read my blog before, you will notice that I reflect a lot, but not only me....also my classmates. In science class, we had to reflect on two different labs, one of them was making water wetter. As I read my lab again, and observed the comments from my teacher, I noticed that I did a pretty well job adding details and explaining, even though, it said, that I missed a part. I guess I wasn't listening in class :P While doing the lab, I learned to accept changes and differences in my answers compared to my hypothesis. For example, my hypothesis was 5 drops for one answers and the minimum i got was about 70.... About doing well, I think I did very well doing my table with all the answers, I think it is pretty clear to read and that it is organized. My difficulties were mostly based on the conclusion, it sounds weir, but since I had all my research already ready, I somehow got a bit confused and couldn't think of anything...After all, I learned some interesting facts while doing this lab, and it was pretty hard in some ways, but I still enjoyed it very much.
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