5/21/09 - Weather - 5th Grade -

Today we are going to look at weather.

Let's start with this activity about weather patterns:

http://www.edheads.org/activities/weather/index.htm


Once we have some knowledge about weather let's check out this activity:http://www.scholastic.com/kids/weather/

We can also check out the Weather Channel for Kids Website:
http://www.theweatherchannelkids.com/

With this activity we will try to cover the 2nd national standard listed below:
National Science Standards
Investigation and Experimentation
Earth Sciences
Grade 5:
1. Water moves in the air from one place to another in the form of clouds or fog, which are tiny droplets of water or ice, and falls to the Earth as rain, hail, sleet, or snow.
2. How to use weather maps and weather forecasts to predict local weather, and that prediction depends on many changing variables.

5/18/09 - 6th Grade Plate Tectonics

Today we are going to explore plate tectonics (the cause of earthquakes and volcanoes).

Vocab:
Ridge -
Plate -
Convection -
Ring of Fire -
Pangea -

Slide 1 of this presentation explains plate movement as convection:http://www.earth.northwestern.edu/people/seth/107/t9conclude.htm

This interactive activity explains plate tectonics: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/tryit/tectonics/#

Sites:

http://www.seismo.unr.edu/ftp/pub/louie/class/100/plate-tectonics.html

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/geology/tectonics.html

5/12/09 - 6th Grade - Heat Transfer

Here are a couple of interactive websites on heat transfer:

See if you can make the heat in the beakers equal in 5 minutes, using one of the materials (glass, aluminum, copper, or steel). Which one works the fastest? What does this mean?

http://www.explorelearning.com/index.cfm?method=cResource.dspView&ResourceID=388

Try this experiment, to heat up the water, using different metals:
http://www.chem.iastate.edu/group/Greenbowe/sections/projectfolder/flashfiles/thermochem/heat_metal.swf

What is more important? - Is it the mass of the metal, or the material you chose?


If you have come up with some questions, after these activities, do a little research on heat energy:

http://www.physics4kids.com/files/thermo_intro.html