Earth Science Week

This year's theme for Earth Science Week is "Exploring Energy"

In thinking about Earth Science Week, I tried to come up with a way to tie theme for the week to my role as an educator. Two articles from the popular press caught my attention. First was an article in NEWSWEEK that mentioned flows in the trans-Alaskan Oil Pipeline are down to less than 700,000 gallons (I think they mean barrels) a day out of a capacity of 2,000,000 barrels per day, and that future production was projected to decrease even further.

This article suggests to me the importance of people understanding the economics of oil. It is surprisingly easy to believe that as technologies increase we will simply be able to maintain our level of oil supply. This was reinforced by another column in NEWSWEEK that points out we have been expecting "peak oil" for nearly a century, but that technology advances have allowed us to continue to bring on line more and more resources. However, the second article also mentions that the cost of extracting these new resources is increasing. I think it is vitally important to get the general population to understand that an economy based on fossil based fuels is only going to become more expensive, and  this poses one of the great challenges to our future.

Philip

Fossil Day

Today is national fossil day, so I thought I'd share a fossil from my teaching collection and let Sam tell a story about it.

One day in the fifth grade, my dad came to talk about fossils. After showing us a number of fossils, he passed this one around but he didn't tell the class what it was, so they had to guess.

While my dad was talking, one of my classmates K, was examining it very carefully holding it close to her face and smelling it. The boy next to her said "give it to me before you lick it." Pretty soon another girl in the class said she though she knew what it was, she said it looked like Dog Poo so she thought it was fossilized poo. When my dad said that is what it was K got out her 3 oz GermX bottle and dumbed it all out on her hand and began to rub it all over her face and hands.

-Sam

The fun thing for me as an educator was that it definitely created a memorable moment for the class. At the end of the year the students in Sam's class each wrote what their most memorable moment of the 5th grade. Two of the students wrote that they remembered the day that K almost ate dinosaur poo!

Sam's Science Chat

This week in science, Mr. S let us watch a Planet Earth video and we saw a part were the vine grew in fast mode.

We also saw a video called Toilets in Space. there was an astronaut who was talking about how instead of rely on gravity but air to take away the waist. We watched that video because the interesting science fact of the day was "Astronauts can not belch in space because there is no gravity to separate liquid from gas in their stomachs."

Sam

Sam's Science Chat

This is my first blogging about my science class in school. I will try every week to blog about something that happened in science class, but I have soccer almost every day after school so might not have time with practice and the games. I will call it Sam’s Science Chat.

My science teacher is Mr. S. Mr. S showed us an unborn baby deer this week. It was lying in a jar and had no fur.

Also, every day we get an interesting science fact, my favorites this week were that a giraffe only sleeps 30 minutes a day, they also have seven vertebra in its neck, the same as a human.

- Sam