The end of Quarter 1 is in Sight

Scary as it may seem, we are almost 1/4 of the way through the school year. This has been a crazy week due to absence on my part. While I was out, students began watching the 1995 film Apollo 13. Although this is a long film, it is scientifically accurate and I will refer to it many times while teaching our current unit and throughout the year.

We are currently in the middle of our unit on motion, acceleration, and forces. Apollo 13 is great because it leads to many discussions. We will explore how it is possible to be 'weightless' and if gravity does not ever go away. Another reason why the movie is great is because it teaches the students about NASA and the space program. Very few students have any idea how difficult it was to get man to the moon. They also do not know how many times the United States has been to the moon or is any other countries have been. Since the Apollo missions occurred long before their birth, they do not understand how significant landing on the moon really was.

I encourage you to discuss the movie with them as well as the space program. Next week we will go to the Moon using Google Maps to explore its features and locate where the Apollo missions landed.

Students have been studying and making calculations of acceleration. This is often a difficult concept for students to grasp. It is not just simply 'speeding up', but more specifically "the rate of change of velocity." It is more like how quickly an object speeds up or slows down. To explore this, we will be discussing and experimenting with objects that are in free fall. We'll be dropping coffee filters and text books and using motion detections to compare their acceleration. This often leads to a discussion of skydiving, so I apologize if they come home with the notion that jumping out of a plane is a good idea.

Lastly, I wanted to inform you that we have started to use

Edmodo to extend the learning that takes place in the classroom to outside of the classroom. Edmodo is a service that provides a location on the web to assign and turn in work, to make posts and responses to prompts, and to get help from myself or classmates. I mentioned its use at Freshman Orientation and I describe it in this document if you would like more information.

Students are required to access Edmodo, which means that they will have to make arrangements to use a computer with Internet access if they do not have it at home. They are welcome to use computers in my room during Freshman Seminar, or during break, lunch, and before and after school.

Please contact me if you have any questions, comments, or concerns.