Welcome to the 2015-2016 school year! - Week one in review

Wow! Just like that, we've completed our first week of school! It's only Friday evening, but the first day jitters seem like a distant memory as we've all settled into our new class. Read on for a brief overview of the various threads of study that we began this week!

But first, say hello to the mysterious, affable, two-headed creature that we call Junella.

Science: Filtration investigation

Various filter designs

As part of our ongoing study of water, watersheds, and water quality, we began a discussion today about water filtration.

Bigfoot projects - Filming and editing

We started today with a quick demonstration about filming and editing our Bigfoot videos. We're using Macbook Airs to film and edit our projects. They're great machines, but they're not necessarily an ideal choice for capturing audio and video. We talked a little bit this morning about how to use close ups and editing to make a more interesting film, and also to work around some of the technical limitations of our equipment. 

For example, filming your script in a single take from far away is visually uninteresting and difficult to hear: 

Filming using establishing shots and close-ups, however, can bring the film alive, while also making things a little easier to see and hear: 

Ford River Rouge Plant tour

We visited the Henry Ford River Rouge Plant last Friday, the highlight of which was touring the factory where the Ford F-150 is assembled. 

STEM: Learning about circuitry and wiring

We've been learning a lot about electricity as part of our STEM work with our Cities theme. We'll be putting this new knowledge to use later this week when we visit Joanna's 3/4 class to help them install lighting in the tiny city that they're building in their classroom ("Ant Arbor"). 

Before we can teach the younger kids, we needed to get some experience ourselves: 

We disassembled switches, outlets, and power cords, examining the inner workings. 

STEM -- Ohm's Law

For the last couple of weeks in STE/Math the middle schoolers have been learning about electric circuits.

We started with the initial prompt: "Here is a battery, a lightbulb and some wires. Make it light up."

After the initial investigation we discussed the key elements that are needed to complete a circuit: a closed path, a voltage source (battery), a load (lightbulb).

Now students were asked to investigate more complex circuits with multiple bulbs and batteries. 

In math class we were able to go a little more in depth into the relationship between the number of lightbulbs, batteries and the brightness of the light (the energy usage rate, which we came to learn in this case is directly related to the current). From some thought exercises, experimental observations (we also talked about independent and dependent variables) and a basic understanding of the mechanism of electrical current we we're able to derive an approximation of Ohm's Law for series circuits--basically doubling the voltage (number of batteries) makes the bulbs twice as bright and doubling the number of lightbulbs cuts the brightness in half.
This led us a little further into math as we talked about direct and indirect proportions; the green group even got a little into the characteristics graphs of direct (a line through the origin) and indirect proportions (a hyperbola with the axes as asymptotes).

Ad project, round two!

We continued our advertising project this morning with a discussion about the science of persuasion and Aristotle's Appeals: ethos, pathos, and logos.