Khan Academy & Pythagorean Practice Problems

We are using Khan Academy to help us practice solving problems using the Pythagorean relationship. This is an amazing resource that has lessons and practice problems for all grades and subjects in Math. Along with sample problems, there are complete solutions provided for each question as well.

Dissolving Skittles Demo

We are working on explaining some of the questions we had after watching Skittles dissolve in hot water. Stay tuned!

Propeller Car Modifications

We spent time today modifying our propeller car designs so that they travelled farther and straighter than the original design. Ava and May's car went the furthest. Brianna, Olivia and Julia's car had the most interesting modifications! They added a second propeller and a third wheel axle.

Pink Shirt Day

Pink Shirt Day is an opportunity for us all to reflect on what we can do to make sure none of us has to experience bullying. It's not enough to wear a pink shirt. We need to make sure we understand why someone might bully and strategies to stand up against bullying. Today, we had an in-depth discussion covering these questions (see image).

Positive relationships are a gift and we need to cherish them. We discussed the characteristics of positive relationships and strategies that we can use to help us turn negative relationships into positive relationships.

Please take time to have a conversation at home about these ideas.

Reflecting on Progress in Math

It is so important to take time to reflect! This image is an example of a solution to a question from the grade 8 quiz today. It incorporates understanding of:

• operations with integers

• BEDMAS

• exponents

We realized that even 2 weeks ago, we wouldn't have had the confidence to solve this question!

Experiments with Solubility

In Science, we are investigating pure substances and mixtures. We designed our own experiments to determine how much salt (or sugar) will dissolve in either hot or cold water.

This image shows Connor and William Murray's experiment with road salt.

Our big question is: where does the salt "go"? Chloe noticed that the volume of water increased as sugar was added to her solution. That led us to do another experiment to measure the mass of water, sugar and the mixture of both.

Please ask us what we discovered!

Pythagorean Relationship

To start thinking about the Pythagorean relationship, we watched a brilliant proof using water. You can find the video here.

This helped us discover that the sum of the areas of the 2 small squares is equal to the area of the large square.

We were curious if this relationship worked for triangles that are NOT right angle triangles and so we tried it with a variety of non-right angle triangles. We discovered that Pythagoras was "right"!

Square Roots

To help us understand the relationship between powers with exponents of 2 ("squares") and square roots, we used a visual model of a square.

Because the area of a square = side x side (or "side squared"), we discovered that if we know that area of a square, the side length can be calculated by taking the square root of the area.