Science

HIGH SCHOOL
High School Science has started the year off strong. Physics just finished a test on Newton's First Law and now move into Projectiles. Heads up! Biology explored Carrying Capacity with a 3-day activity trying to keep cups alive by feeding them beans while battling shelter, predators, and disease. Chemistry is figuring out the Periodic Table and made a wall diagram of an Argon atom replete with s & p orbitals shown! And Systems of the Human Body dissected a chicken wing and made their own wall diagram showing the interactions between muscles, tendons, and bones. We are also super excited for our 9th graders to see all this science in action during our three-day Fall experiential overnight to Camp SEA Lab starting on Monday. Woo-hoo!
–Jay Huston, High School Science

Students were exploring elements in the main group of the periodic table. At the top is an electron configuration diagram and all the arrows are called an orbital diagram. In the bottom, right they are identifying the number of valence electrons and the number of energy levels. And finally in the bottom left, they are doing a Lewis dot diagram. These are four ways of looking at the same element, in this case Polonium.

MIDDLE SCHOOL
Middle School students have been working on effective scientific observation skills and learning the difference between their observations, which are based on things they can see, touch, hear, and smell, versus an inference – something that is a conclusion based on observations. Students have done a little bit of microscope work, focusing on learning how to draw what they see while looking through a microscope at 20x magnification. We will continue to work on these foundational skills for the remainder of the first quarter.
–Tasha Hudick, K-8 Science

ELEMENTARY
Elementary students are learning the basics of measuring, mixing, and following simple instructions in a science experiment. We’ve done some simple chemical reactions and explored two different types of slime! We are using our science toolkit, Our Senses, to talk about our experiments.
​–Tasha Hudick, K-8 Science