Making Graphs
Students studied conic sections this month. They learned how to graph circles, ellipses, hyperbolas, and parabolas.
Mrs. Wong
Pendulums
Physics students have been exploring the pendulum this month. They studied the effects of varied string length, angles, and materials.
Mrs. Wong
End of the Year
We enjoyed our last few classes together, as we reminisced about how fast the year went and how much fun we had, we also reviewed the major themes and events to know for the Regents and practiced the thematic and DBQ essays. We brought in snacks to share to make the intense study sessions a little more bearable. But, they paid off, as students did very well on their Regents; several students were just one question away from a perfect score!
Mrs. Lapp
Current Events
Seniors worked on their final exam projects, which involved reading up on the news and finding an article related to economics. After finding something of interest, students wrote a paper explaining an economic concept that we studied and then relating it to the current event that they researched. Students turned in a variety of projects: on the oil spill and supply and demand, on New York City cupcakeries and candy shops and the free market, on the NBA and absolute/comparative advantage, on Microsoft and monopolies.
Mrs. Lapp
All good things come to an end
8th grade has learned a lot about the world. And now it’s time to prove it. Finals are coming up!
Miss Kleinschuster
Be careful what you eat
Chapter 28 centers around the treatment of the human body – that is, how we treat ourselves. Our bodies are temples for the Living God, and we shouldn’t abuse them. Obesity is now recognized as a growing and deadly trend; the flip side takes the form of eating disorders that deny any form of nutrition. Seventh grade is learning that poor food choices can lead to the development of noninfectious diseases, and so can drug abuse. Just because a drug isn’t addictive doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous, and there are plenty of drugs that can be obtained legally at a certain age, but can still be abused. Now is the time to instill wise habits. Stay healthy and stay clean!
Miss Kleinschuster
Inertia
However, an object in motion will stay in motion – that is the law. Newton’s First Law, to be exact. Sixth grade is continuing to learn about physics and the concept of inertia. Inertia is the tendency of an object to stay in motion, or, if it was at rest, to stay at rest. Scientists of Sir Isaac Newton’s time were incorrect in their assumptions about motion. They thought it required constant force to keep something moving. It’s really that other variables come into play: gravity, friction, an object in the way, and so forth. An object’s direction or speed will only change if something acts upon it; that’s Newton’s Second Law. Interestingly, Newton may not have made his many discoveries about math and motion if he had not been escaping the break-out of a plague at his university. And what if that killer apple had never fallen on his head? That’s what got the ball rolling… so to speak.
Miss Kleinschuster
WATER WATER EVERYWHERE
Water is the universal solvent, able to break down many chemical bonds. It can also physically break something down. And that’s why a sudden rainstorm after a drought can actually be quite dangerous to soil: it can move loose earth around very, very quickly. 8th grade is studying the water cycle, the formation of rivers, and the power behind moving water. It covers 70% of the globe – and very little of it is actually drinkable. You wouldn’t think you’d need to conserve it since it’s right there in the ocean, but… what’s happening to our oceans even now?
Miss kleinschuster
OF LIFE & DEATH
How does the species – any species – continue? Why, through reproduction, of course, whether asexual or sexual. Some organisms are genetically identical to their single parent. That is not the case with humans, of course, and seventh grade is making a study of the reproductive cycle and human development.
Did you know that blood cells begin to form by the time an embryo is a month old? Before the second month is over the embryo has a heart, brain, spinal cord, limbs, muscles, nerves, fingers and toes. It can even swallow and blink and only measures sixteen millimeters.
Thanks to Adam and Eve’s failure to comply with God’s single rule, however, there’s a lot of stuff out there to give us: viruses, bacteria, any number of other pathogens. 7th grade will learn how the body is formed to protect itself from infection, and what happens if something gets past our defenses.
Miss Kleinschuster
NEED TO LOSE WEIGHT FAST? GO TO THE MOON
Sixth grade has learned why you weigh less on the Moon – and why you weigh more on Jupiter: gravity. It’s not your body that changes (that’s your mass); it’s the strength of what’s keeping you on the surface. In fact, if you climbed a mountain, you would weigh less even on Earth, because the top of the mountain is farther away from the center of the planet’s gravity.
Did you know that if you drop a feather and a hammer at the same time on the Moon, they will hit the surface at the same time? Sixth grade knows! They learned that since there is no air there, there’s nothing to make the feather float. That experiment couldn’t be performed effectively on Earth until anti-gravity chambers were invented, but Galileo Galilei, an Italian scientist from the 16th Century, did some of the initial tests to theorize that all objects fall in the same rate in a vacuum.
Miss Kleinschuster