Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Happy Holiday Homework!















Happy Holidays to all! Hope you are enjoying your vacation. Santa not so much. He just finished delivering a ton of gifts and now he has to finish his science homework...Argh! 

Assignment #1
Okay, so the first assignment is to find the melting point and boiling point for your element. Element? What element? The element you were assigned last unit. The same one you made an atom model and a movie poster for. That element. If you've forgotten, you should look back at your atom model attack plan and all of the other assignments we did leading up to those projects. Was your element Boron? Oxygen? Actinium? Try and remember. Once you find out, research your element and find out at what temperature it becomes a solid, a liquid, and a gas. Not all elements go through all three phases. Find out which phases yours goes through and then draw a heating curve. The units for time don't have to be accurate, but the temperature units must be accurate. So decide what your scale is for temperature and graph accordingly.

Here are some examples of heating curves for water: Curve A just shows a general heating curve for water without any explanation while Curve B has descriptions for what is happening at each part of the curve. Both curves have the correct temperature scale with ice melting at 0 Celsius and water boiling at 100 Celsius. Your heating curves should look more like Curve B.

Assignment #2
The other assignment is to type a 1/2 page explaining 3 ways in which you will interact with water over the break. Your story can be real or totally invented, it just has to be creative and use water as a solid, a liquid, and a gas. It can involve building a snowman, or doing a mission impossible break into the russian ice palace, or an evening washing dishes. Whatever you think up. If you can relate it to the holidays that's even better.

Extra Credit - Research Project
This is optional. Below you will find a pdf with instructions. You can choose 1 from a list of 8 scientists and do a research paper on him/her answering the questions presented on the sheet, ie where s/he was born, what did s/he contribute to science, etc... Should be 1-2 pages typed.

Download the extra credit pdf here.

Weight, Mass, Volume, Density


For everyone that wanted a copy of the song Weight, Mass, Volume, Density the weight is over...oops, I meant to say the wait is over. You can download the mp3 here. You can also get a pdf of Young Bill's copy of the lyrics here. Enjoy!