Middle School Science

In Earth Science students started the year learning about the “Nature of Science” and how to think like a scientist.  They learned about observations and inferences and the scientific method and practiced what they had learned with a favorite lab, “The Candy Lab”.  Our next topic of the year was Earth’s Minerals and Rocks.  Our class did group mini projects on the three rock types and presented their findings to the class. They then used clay to model the process of rocks moving through the rock cycle!  Next,  we moved on to Plate Tectonics and studied continental drift, plate boundaries and Pangea.  The class enjoyed the “Plate Tectonic Lab”.  For this lab they used graham crackers and lava “confectioners sugar” to model the creation of earthquakes, mountain ranges and volcanoes due to plate boundary movements.  The obvious next topic was volcanoes which the students thought was a blast :)!  They studied the various types of volcanoes and reported on them and created large volcano models and erupted them outside.  Earthquakes were our next topic and it was a lot of fun.  Students learned to read seismograms, used triangulation to determine the epicenter of an earthquake and studied where earthquake zones are located.  We finished the semester looking at Earth’s Freshwater.  Did you know you can bend water using static electricity?

During the second half of the year students built simple water filters and later in Spring, as the weather warmed, looked at all the life found in a single drop of pond water under the microscope.  They did reports on an organism of their choice that you might typically find in a drop of pond water and shared with the class.  In January, we studied the dazzling amount of life in Earth’s Oceans.  Students learned about the ocean zones, coastal pollution and recycling.  They created a picture including all of the zones of the ocean and representative organisms that live in each zone.  Next we moved to Earth’s History.  Students created a class calendar documenting earth’s history and studied the various eras looking at key events in each time period. From there we moved on to study prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells.  The students got to view various types of cells under the microscope and learn to distinguish between plant and animal cells and name the organelles associated with both.  Biodiversity and Ecosystems was our next topic.  Students enjoyed a lab in which they determined that yeast is alive by watching it inflate a balloon as it carried out cellular respiration.  We also looked at biological communities and energy flow in an ecosystem.  Our last two topics of the year were Evolution and Populations and Introduction to Genetics.  Students played a game which modeled mutation and speciation and created a unique parrot by looking at the genotypes of various traits and doing punnett’s square analyses to determine the phenotype of the offspring.  

I really enjoyed my time teaching Earth Science this year! What a great group of kids! I hope you all have a wonderful summer.  

Warmly-

Ronnie Yastion