Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Moon Phases, Eclipses, and More

On Tuesday, the 23 of March, conversation topics revolved around projects, labs and astronomy. We began the class by reviewing and discussing our current and future labs and projects. First, we focused on the Phases and Eclipse lab who's purpose was to determine how the alliance of the Sun, Earth, and Moon influence moon phases, solar eclipses, and lastly, lunar eclipses. We had then gone over the procedure of this lab in which we had to make 8 drawings of the moon phases, one drawing of the solar eclipse, and another of the lunar eclipse demonstrating how they work.


The IV and DV were also brought up as words that had been defined as:

IV (independent variable): Matter that is being controlled by you.

DV ( dependent variable): the result of the variable.

In class, Ms. D had completed drawing #1 for us which had been in the phase of a "new moon", being a 0 or 360 degree angle, because of its linear stance with the Sun and Earth. Furthermore, she reminded us to think about the object that moves, which is the moon, while completing our drawings and to also, think about their angles and pay close attention to them!


* Keep in mind that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and the Moon revolves around the Earth.
These are just some helpful links on Moon Phases and Lunar Eclipses!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHxcWSiD_4E&feature=related

As the class prolonged, we continued working on our Phases and Eclipses lab with our heads serving as the Earth, white balls serving as the Moon, and light bulb playing the role of the Sun. As our heads (Earth) rotated, along with the moon, we began to observe the many phases of the Moon as the Sun ( lightbulb) shone its light onto the Moon giving us (Earth) the reflected image of the Moon. Ms. D cautioned us to review our work, and to follow the directions of turning in work for full credit.


FULL CREDIT WORK:
  • have the title, date and work; lab is on TOC

  • the purpose must be copied directly

  • include IV and DV

  • include hypothesis

  • drawings (10 in total)

  • answers to the questions

  • conclusion
In your conclusion, be sure to include your summary paragraph about what you learned, answer the purpose question, support your hypothesis (or not), and remember to include why. Additionally, you have to be under the impression of how this lab was related to our everyday world, and create a bullet list of possible mistakes in this lab and why they were taken as mistakes from your point of view.

**This lab is due Thursday March the 25.**

As people started to finish up with the drawings of their lab, they headed down to the lower computer lab to get started on a project called the "Travel Agent for a Celestial Body Project".

Cornelia, however, will expand on this topic in her blog post.
The Celestial bodies the students have received in class goes as follows:

Sun- Kamil

Mercury- Aidan

Venus- Gregor

Earth- Davide

Mars- Abigail

Asteroids/belt- Emma

Jupiter-Arnie

Saturn- Ines

Uranus- Luke

Neptune- Holly

Pluto- Alex

Eris- German

Ceres- Jacob

Hauma & Makemake- Hana

Meteors, etc.- Severyn

Comets- Cornelia

Exo-Solar Planets- Daniel

* This lab is due NEXT Thursday*

In addition, we went over the homework and due dates for certain items (listed below)
Due:
  • March the 30th is a list of bulleted notes for your Celestial body (by 4:00 p.m.)

  • Thursday April 1st is a travel agency styled brochure in color (come to Ms.D if you cannot get hold of a color printer for you do have to use color in this assignment), 5 questions and answers about your Celestial body based on your collected information, and a typed copy of a bibliography in APA format (must be emailed to Ms. D at class time 11:30 a.m.)
Send to: dani.dipietro@aisz.hr or ddipietro.aisz@gmail.com
All of these directions and project copies are posted on Moodle.
There is NO APOD due for Tuesday's class as Ms. D wants us to focus on our Celestial body project!

Also, make sure that your Random Questions are up to date as Ms. D will be checking them while grading our notebooks for the Phases and Eclipses Lab.

There is NO homework for Spring Break but remember BLOG!

Next Scriber- Cornelia

3 comments:

  1. This is a great scribe post Emma! It is very colorful and informative. Also i enjoyed the links you posted from Youtube as they were very informative. The colors were really good, just watch out for the yellow at time because it is quite bright and hard to read. Here i have one Brainpop video link to improve your post even more: http://www.brainpop.com/science/space/moon/
    All in all, you did a fantastic job with this scribe post!

    Ines
    Major edit

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  2. Emma - Your post is very informative. You cover all of the dates and the things we did in class well. I think you personally could have written a bit more about the science of the phases of the moon and eclipses and why they happen. But your links to Ask An Astronomer are cute and helpful. Make sure that they are hyperlinked - the first is, but the second is not. Be careful of word choice in places, as your meaning sometimes gets confusing. Good use of color, links and pictures to spice up your post. Good work overall :)

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  3. Good job,Emma. There are a lot of informations in your post which i think is great. Just reading it, i could imagine everything you did on the lesson. I like the colours that you used for the post but some paragrafs are to small to read. I can't see the picture that you put. It's great that you put links about astronomy. I agree with Ms.D that you make sure that links are hyperlinked.

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