Week of October 28th

 In lab we talked about what materials were considered a rock with the investigation question; Is it a rock? We then talked about the reading we had this past week, activitymania. The reading talked about how just because lessons are hands on doesn't mean that its mind on. Us as teacher, need to be smart about what we are showing and actually teach for learning. We then talked about ways we can assess kids and how grades can show a way of understanding the material but won't show all of them. If student 1 has a A and student 2 has a B, it doesn't mean that student 1 is smarter than student B. Some students can be better at different types of test. At the end of the day it matters if the student learned or not. We then talked about some history about grades. I learned that the Vietnam war was one cause of why the percentages of how many students got an A went up. People back then didn't want to go to war, so teachers would give out more A's so the students could go to college rather than war. We then went back to our test grades from last week and worked on what we thought the grade scale should be for our past assessment. After talking about our tests, we started talking about the layers of the Earth. We know that there is a core and a mantle. The layers of the earth can cause convection. Heat rises and cools in the mantle which causes it to rise and sink. This process causes plates to move which causes mountains, trenches, volcanos, etc. Lastly, we used starbursts to show different rock cycles.

After reading the pressbook, I learned the history of the earth and earth's "timeline". the first life on earth was 4 billion years ago (bacteria), and 600 million years ago animals started to evolve. I learned that at least 3 times, earth has been called "snowball" earth as the planet was engulfed almost entirely in ice. this "snowball" earth was caused by these series of events called a positive feedback loop. This is a process of where one change triggers the next. As the ice started, the sun couldn't cool it down and it ended up covering the whole planet. Volcanoes then stopped this process by changing ice into water. Earth was once all connected together during a period called the supercontinent, Pangea. Since then earth's plates started shifting (continental drift) causing our earth to look like how it is today. 

In lecture we talked about the results from the past google forms we did in lab. We learned that rocks are naturally made. We also talked about how the layers of the earth can be related to an hard boiled egg. We also talked about the different boundaries when talking about plate tectonics. There are divergent (dividing), transform (when the plates are sliding past each other, parallel), and convergent (coming together) boundaries. For convergent boundaries they can make trenches which are made from oceanic crust. We talked about how oceanic crust is way more dense than continental crust. We then talked about when we have two continental crusts coming together (convergent) we have mountains. Divergent can cause ocean ridges which is two oceanic plates that are moving away from each other. As these plates move away from each other there is new rock that comes and fills the spots. So as you move away from the ridge the rock is older and older. Divergent boundaries also creates rifts between two continental plates. Lastly, transform boundaries create earthquakes. We then learned that hotspots of areas at earth of where magma comes up. These hotspots created islands (Hawaii). Note: plates are always moving! We also talked about how we knew that Pangea was once a thing (continents were once all together), by the fossils that we find. We have found the same fossils/plants in the same continents such as the same as South America and Africa. How could those seeds/fossils travel that far across the ocean? We then talked about the cycle of rocks (shown below). We then talked about weathering and erosion (chemical/physical)

Photos:

test scale my group thinks

plates

Fossils (pangea)

rock cycle