10/27/14 & 11/3/14--Ordering Events from Earth's History

 Brain Break?!?!  

The students have been working so hard on a subject that is hard to conceptualize due to its inability to be put in their hands or be seen.  Despite those challenges the students have done a wonderful job understanding the activities and the expanse of the Earth's interior.  Due to their hard work and the fact that we want to continue to welcome our new 6th graders to the group we did a team building activity with the students that had nothing to do with Earth! =)     

The students were given a certain amount of the following: yarn, tape, spaghetti noodles and a marshmallow.  This these items they had to try and build the tallest free standing structure in a given time.  They really enjoyed this activity and the competitiveness came out in them all!

 After our friendly competition we delve into the next IMSA lesson, Earth's History.  Each student was given an event in Earth's History and the goal was for them to put themselves in the correct order.  The snapshots below show them hard at work trying to order themselves from earliest to most recent.  Not only were they timed but they could not talk to one another either.  Our 8th graders really took the lead in organizing everyone.  When they felt ready we checked their order and told them how many were wrong.  They tried a second time to get organized with less time allotted.  We then checked them again and gave them one last shot but this time allowed conversation about it.  All said and done they did very well.  Our 6th and 7th graders offered a lot of insight on their 3rd try and they all worked very well together.

We then finished the Earth's History lesson on Nov. 3rd.  We took the events we worked with last week and looked at the actual historical time it occurred and then scaled it to the length on one year.  We did this using formulas and Google sheets on the kids' Chromebooks.  The students were very surprised to see the correlation of when some of the events occurred in the scaled version of a years time.  

We will now be moving into looking at convection currents, plate tectonics and volcanoes!!!!
Can't wait to see everyone on Monday, Nov. 10th and don't forget the field trip on Wednesday, Nov. 12th!!  It will be a great time as IMSA!