Homework 10/17/09

This past week in Science class we focused on demonstrating the uses of a microscope. My group tested a pot/chicken in a petri dish and pond water under a microscope. After that we resaerched and recorded our results. Before we could conduct our experiments we had to do a few quizes, like an oral quiz explaning how to use a microscope, and what the parts are and what they do. Then we wrote out procedures for them. We learned how to do experiments by doing mini lessons and having class discussions. It is very important to not do anything wrong when setting up or doing an experiment because then you knowledge is wrong because your results are not accurate, this is why we had to make sure to not contaminate the things that we were testing and to set up the slides carefully. We also talked about small organisms this week. We learned about them by studying a simulation that focuses in on tiny organisms such as Paramecium and tRNA. A stimulation is a picture that describes a transformation of a stage. It is important to know about these microscopic organisms because we are going to be experimenting with them, and they live around us so we should know a little bit about them at least.

Also This week we had to continue helping the nearby schools with finding out why there students have been getting sick. My group was going to test the pan for bacteria but the pan was gone, so the pond water was still there to test so we set up a slide and observed it, and we found multiple things.We found a dead organism and a living organism.

Homework 10/3/09

This week in science we learned about Truman Middle Schools absenses, and we started an experiment about bacteria in the bathrooms of our middle school.
It turned out that the Truman Middle School had many band absenses that we had noticed a few weeks ago, so we explored that and we found out that Truman and Jackson Middle School had a band competition. So we looked online and searched for hypothesis about what virus the Truman Middle School is spreading, and our two main hypothesis were food poisoning and West Nile desies. We thought these were very likely because the band competition was outside, and this was in June, so there were deffinatly misquitos outside so we attached West Nile with that. But we also relized that the band competition was outdoors in a pavilion next to a lake. And West Nile disease is spread through misquitos and misquitos are attracted to water and since the band had been right near a lake oudoors for probably multiple hours during June we figured that they were deffinatly exposed to misquitos. But then after the battle of the bands the kids went to a cheap chicken resturant which hadn't passes a food test and so many if not almost all of the kids went there to eat, so they deffinatly could have gotten food poisoning from the cheap chicken hut. Also if you look at the website it shows that many kids are having symptoms to fit both of these hypothesis.

This week for our experiment that we started it was about the cleanliness of our middle school bathrooms. We were shown how to use a swab correctly, and what we did was we took our swabs and rubbed then against two surfaces that we wanted to test one clean and the other dirty and we then after rubbing the swabs on the surface we lightly rubbed the swab on one part of our petri dish with the agar and then did the same for the next surface. Then we just put them away to see what happened with the bacteria that was on the agar now for Monday.

This past week in science we have been learninig about the question, What is living? We have been creating different categories which are living, dead, non-living, dormant, and organic to decide how we can seperate different objects by their characteristics of life. Like we would study an item and then analyze it to make a hypothesis about it and its characteristics of life, so we would question/ test our hypothesis.
In class we have also started this activity about a school needing help figuring out what kind of sickness the kids in the school are getting, and spreading to eachother. We have been looking through different things on the schools website to try and make hypothises to test by getting evidence to explore. Like maybe since most of the band students have been sick that maybe the band kids have been spreading their sickness by transmitting it by moulth pieces. And we are hoping to learn more about the spread of the sickness more next week, so that we can help the schools.


*i did it on a piece of paper over the weekend so you said to type it today but it is not late* :)