Calculating Speed with Paper Airplanes

During February, learners had a fun way to practice math and science skills! Students were allowed to go to www.funpaperairplanes.com and find a design to create. We were able to measure the distance the planes went using the metric system and then record the time with a stopwatch in seconds. Dividing the distance by the time will give students the average speed. Our time only allowed us to have one practice throw and two trials, but students should understand that more trials certainly would have been valuable to validate average speed. This helps support the concepts on speed and motion taught in Chapter 3 of the textbook. Practicing the math skills in science class gives students a real world application of sports statistics. It's useful that they practiced the skills before the Montcas test in March.

Energy Unit Wordle!

Follow this link to a 'wordle' I made for the Physical Science Energy Unit. A ' wordle' is an art concept of terms associated with this unit of study:

Chemistry Unit

Students have just completed the Chemistry unit for 8th grade and will take the Billings Public School District Assessment on Wed., Dec. 17th. I'd like some feedback on the unit: did you learn the basics about the periodic chart of the elements from the videos, texts, or worksheets? Did you like the experiments with bleach, copper acetate and the borax crystals? What part of the textbook readings did you like or dislike the most? Can you suggest any other strategies? Give me some ideas on what helps learners the most!