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Spring SAVY 2018, Day 4- Truth vs. Perception (5th/6th)
Feb. 19, 2018—Today, we looked at how fictional stories combine elements of truth and fiction to tell us about ourselves, what is important to us, and how we perceive the world. First, we finished our conversation on mythologies by discussing the end of “The Hero’s Journey” with the reward and resolution of the journey by finishing the...
Spring SAVY 2018, Day 4- A Great Debate (3rd/4th)
Feb. 19, 2018—Saturday was another great day in Debate. We had some absences so our teams were remade and this required new topics! Fortuitous. We built on our policy style of debate by having two person teams spend five minutes each of guided time on the computer looking for actual evidence to back up our logical arguments....
Spring SAVY 2018, Day 4- Unpacking Adaptation (3rd/4th)
Feb. 19, 2018—Class, Wow, what a dreary rainy day we had to contend with! I imagine you felt a bit like the Pevensie children, cooped up and yearning for adventure! Perhaps that’s why is was best that our day’s focus was primarily on the text and on reading collectively the work of Mr. C.S. Lewis. We covered...
Spring SAVY 2018, Day 4- Modified Organisms (3rd/4th)
Feb. 19, 2018—Hello Parents and Students! With all this bad weather what better place to be except inside the classroom?! Today we went over our results from the corn experiment. Everyone recorded the data collected from the class and determined….either they ate it or they didn’t (pretty much animals love food). We did have some outliers where...
Spring SAVY 2018, Day 4- Earth Explorers (1st/2nd)
Feb. 19, 2018—Yesterday in Earth Explorers we learned about the world of water. We discussed the water-cycle and investigated some parts of it individually including making our own clouds in plastic bottles. We learned how much water is distributed between different sources, with only fractions of a percent of the global water budget being available for us...
Spring SAVY 2018, Day 4- Ecological Expedition (1st/2nd)
Feb. 19, 2018—Happy Fourth Day! As ecologists, the students revisited the debate “Should humans cut down trees?” by reading about reasons for and against deforestation (cutting down trees). They viewed the videos, “Food Chains” and “Abiotic and Biotic Factors” and afterwards examined how living things interact through food chains by analyzing the benefits of producers, consumers, and...
Spring SAVY 2018, Day 4- It’s Elemental (1st/2nd)
Feb. 19, 2018—We started It’s Elemental this week by reviewing some properties of elements. We learnt more about reactivity with an interesting demonstration using pennies. Pennies coined after 1982 are made by coating zinc with copper instead of using pure copper. Since zinc is more reactive with acid, new pennies with exposed zinc will react to form...
Spring SAVY 2018, Day 4- What’s the Matter (Kindergarten)
Feb. 19, 2018—During our fourth week of SAVY, we explored more fully one of the chemical properties of matter: acidity and basicity. We learned how scientists use the pH scale to describe how acidic or basic a substance is. We learned about household items that are acids (lemons, limes, vinegar) and bases (soap, most cleaners, bleach, eggs)....
Spring SAVY 2018, Day 4- Probability and Prediction (Kindergarten)
Feb. 19, 2018—It was another fun week in SAVY! We spent our time together thinking about theoretical probability and experimental probability. In other words, we were thinking about what we expected to happen and what actually happened when we performed a probability experiment. When flipping coins, we would expect that we would see about the same number...
Spring SAVY 2018, Day 3- Biophotonics (5th/6th)
Feb. 12, 2018—This week, we finished compiling our optical toolboxes with the addition of fluorescence, scattering, Monte Carlo Simulations, and spectrometers. Students designed their own experiments to identify different fluorophores. Using different wavelengths of light, we were able to plot the excitation and emission spectra for quinine, Vitamin D, and rhodamine. As a major component of laser-tissue...