Refraction

Why does that diamond ring sparkle so much? Why does that fish in the pond not exactly appear where you thought it was? Why, refraction of course. Here are several websites and demonstrations that help with the concept of refraction.

Refraction

Refraction through a glass block

Winter Break

I hope everyone had a great winter break. What did everyone do? Send some pictures to me and I will post some pictures of what students did over break. Here are some of my pictures from a trip to Indianapolis last week. 

Indiana University football stadium

Downtown Indianapolis

More downtown Indianapolis

Downtown canal

 NCAA Hall of Champions Museum

Inside the NCAA Hall of Fame 

The Electromagnetic Spectrum

There are several websites that are helpful in describing the electromagnetic spectrum. Here are two of them.

http://www.darvill.clara.net/emag/

http://missionscience.nasa.gov/ems/index.html

In the above website there is also a video series that reviews each part of the electromagnetic spectrum. This video series can be found here: http://missionscience.nasa.gov/ems/emsVideo_01intro.html

Ugly Holiday Sweaters Spotted at Skate Night

Check out these ugly sweaters spotted at Kate's Skate!

Tips for Conducting a Science Fair Experiment

Experiment time! Here are several websites with tips on how to perform a great experiment.

Chemistry.about.com

Wikihow.com

Building Ziggurats

6th graders worked hard last week during the two half days in building Sumerian ziggurats and courtyards. Here are some pictures. 

Even working out some numbers to try and make each layer in the ziggurat proportional. 

Great work students!

Creating a Bibliography

A bibliography or works cited page lists the resources a person uses to write a paper or essay. The bibliography should be on a page by itself, follow MLA guidelines, and should be in alphabetical order. There are several websites that can help students create the citations needed for the bibliography. Here are two:

Easy Bib

Citation Machine

Example:

History Read to You

There are countless resources on the Internet for students and adults to learn just about anything. The following website contains many pages on the history of our world. The author of the website even provides a link to hear him read each lesson out loud. This is a great resource for students who enjoy books on tape or would like to know the proper pronunciation of different, more complex or foreign words or would rather listen to help them focus on comprehending or understanding the topic.

The home page can be found here: http://www.mrdowling.com/.

The unit on Mesopotamia can be found here: Mesopotamia

Block 1 Rainbow Lab

Food Assignment Example

Here is an example for the food assignment that is due Friday. Looking forward to learning about where many different foods came from!