Wednesday, November 10, 2010

General Announcements:

• Reminder: There is no school for students this coming Thursday, 11/11 (Veterans' Day) and Friday, 11/12 (Professional Development Day).
• All materials left over from Day of the Dead ofrendas need to be taken home ASAP!
• We need tissues! Cold season is upon us and we need nice tissues for sore noses. If every Prism family donated one box of tissues, that would almost certainly get us through the worst of tissue season.

Math:

• Nada

Language Arts:

• Nada

Social Studies:

• Due Mon., 11/15: Type a bibliograpy (using citation protocols here) for every source used in your timeline research.

Science:

• Due Mon., 11/15:
  • Type (12 pt. Times or similar) summary of the Bioassessment.
  • Include your drawing of an image from the activity—~1/3 page.
  • Notes on bioassessment available here

Spanish:

• Grade 7:
  • Due :
• Grade 8:
  • Due :

Moment of Zen:

Scientists Excited At Cluelessness About Bubbles

Something big is going on at the center of the galaxy, and astronomers are happy to say they don’t know what it is. A group of scientists working with data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope said Tuesday that they had discovered two bubbles of energy erupting from the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The bubbles, which will be in a paper to be published Wednesday in The Astrophysical Journal, extend 25,000 light years up and down from each side of the galaxy and contain the energy equivalent to 100,000 supernova explosions.

“They’re big,” said Doug Finkbeiner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, leader of the team that discovered them. The source of the bubbles is a mystery, [but] what it’s apparently not is dark matter, the mysterious something that astronomers say makes up a quarter of the universe and holds galaxies together.

"Rapid Bioassessment" Notes

Notes for your Summary of the "Rapid Bioassessement" of our Mill River - 11/9/2010

¶1: What is a "bioassessment"?
• collect bugs (benthic macroinvertebrates = riverbed-dwelling insects you can see)
• collect from 3 different sites on a 30 ft stretch of our river
• return to same site each year to collect; report data ro Department of Environmental Protection (DEP)

¶2: Procedure
1. with a kicknet, collected samples
2. kept 3 different bins, one for each site
3. Brought bins inside
   1. with spoons, we ordered bugs into ice cube trays
   2. refined our ordering using a field guide key to identify specimens accurately
4. labeled each sample, added alcohol to the containers, and sent to DEP

¶3: What our results tell us:
1. found more than 5 of 2 kinds of instect that need a lot of Oxygen (O₂) to survive
2. shows "exceptionally good" water quality in our River: there's much O₂ in our river here at school!

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

General Announcements:

• Reminder: There is no school for students this coming Thursday, 11/11 (Veterans' Day) and Friday, 11/12 (Professional Development Day).
• All materials left over from Day of the Dead ofrendas need to be taken home ASAP!
• We need tissues! Cold season is upon us and we need nice tissues for sore noses. If every Prism family donated one box of tissues, that would almost certainly get us through the worst of tissue season.

Math:

• Grade 7:
  Due Wed., 11/10:
  • Complete 4.1 on pp. 50-51

• Grade 7B:
  Due Wed., 11/10:
  • Complete #19 on p. 31

• Grade 8:
  Due Wed., 11/10:
  • Do #16 but do graphs by hand. Be sure to have rubric glued onto paper and have grid paper.

Language Arts:

• Due Wed., 11/10:
  • Redo Open Response Question answer.
  • Return all originals with "new stuff".
  • Complete Venn diagram and first paragraph only:
    • First sentence
    • bullet 3 main ideas to develop—in sentence form

Social Studies:

• Due Wed., 11/10:
  1. Complete Drawing of Hindu aum symbol.
     
  2. Revise/edit your 3¶ summary of timeline research. Your revised version should be typed, double-spaced, and 12 pt of Times New Roman or similar font.

Science:

• Nada

Spanish:

• Grade 7:
  • Due Wed., 11/10: Comic Strip of p. 1 in ch. 2 of Pobre Ana
• Grade 8:
  • Due Wed., 11/10: ¿Qué te parece bonito? Me parece bonito... (3 cosas)

Moment of Zen:

Ok, Jason

There you are.

Monday, November 8, 2010

General Announcements:

• Reminder: There is no school for students this coming Thursday, 11/11 (Veterans' Day) and Friday, 11/12 (Professional Development Day).
• All materials left over from Day of the Dead ofrendas need to be taken home ASAP!
• We need tissues! Cold season is upon us and we need nice tissues for sore noses. If every Prism family donated one box of tissues, that would almost certainly get us through the worst of tissue season.

Math:

• Grade 7 & 8:
  Due Tues., 11/9:
  • Work for another 20 min. on the Math League sheet you worked on today. This will include at least 5 problems.

Language Arts:

• Due Tues., 11/9: If the Venn diagram for your essay has not been completed by the end of the second LA class, it is to be completed for homework.

Social Studies:

• Due Tues., 11/9: Revise/edit your 3¶ summary of timeline research. Your revised version should be typed, double-spaced, and 12 pt of Times New Roman or similar font.

Science:

• :

Spanish:

• Grade 7 & 8:
  • Nada

Moment of Zen:

Hidden Art Gallery

When most art galleries put up a new show, the opening is a grand event aimed at helping the artists' work get sold; the show hangs for weeks in a well-lit public location, then is replaced by something new. Not the Underbelly. This unique display space, which puts aside the usual characteristics of an art gallery. Located in an abandoned, unfinished tunnel of the New York subway, it's virtually inaccessible. The space's custodians are trying to keep its whereabouts on the downlow because, well, they aren't really supposed to be there either.

So what's the point? The group wants to challenge the commodification of art, which in the last decade or two has grown to legitimize and, therefore, commercialize street art. They look to reclaim its outrageous, illegal secrecy.

Click above to read more about the development of the idea and the process of creating the art in the space.