Thursday, September 10th, 2009

Hello it's been quite a week so far!

In science thIs week...

Tuesday, we introduced the word ecosystem to our science vocabulary. The students did a "making words activity, that will also be used for a spelling grade. Wednesday, I was out at a science staff development learning about fun, new experiments that we will do in the classroom. While I was out the substitute should have reviewed a few vocabulary words that the students should be familiar with, these were: producer, consumer, carnivore, herbivore, omnivore, predator and prey. Today, Thursday, we watched a clip of a Dirty Jobs episode that discusses Avian Vomitologists, scientists who study bird (owl) regurgitation. Why!? To
tomorrow, Friday, we will be dissecting owl pellets. This fun experiment allows us to "see" what the owls are eating and gives us, quite literally, an inside look at the food chain. While watching the episode we briefly touch on the terms adaptation, a structure or behavior that allows an organism to survive in it's environment, and niche (please note this word is scientifically pronounced Nee-sh, not Ni-t-ch), which is an organisms specific role/job/function in an ecosystem. For instance, the owl's niche is to keep the rodents and vermin from over-populating and ruining crops and harvests.

In math...

Tuesday, we made arrays, picture representations of a number sentence, and each student was given a number, and was responsible for showing all of the possible arrays for that number. Wednesday with the sub, the students finished making their array displays and then learned what a prime number was, any number whose factors are one and itself. They then created a chart of these numbers that we referred to in today's lesson... Prime factorization/factor trees. Tomorrow, we will take that information and study GCF, Greatest Common Factors.

Next week we start our BIG ecosystems projects, we will need all 2-liter bottles by that day!!! I'm so excited for the upcoming activities, IT'S GOING TO BE GREAT!!