Mimmo's 5th Blog

What science ideas did you learn?

This week we learned more about wave diagrams. We learned how fast they move and why. They move fast through air because the air is not dense, but they move slower through water because it is a much denser material. The waves are close together when the are moving slow and the waves are spread apart when they are moving fast. I also learned about the normal line. The normal line is the line that is perpendicular to the surface.
We also had a "carnival" games thing where we went around to different things and did the task. There were 6 tasks that we had to complete. First we had to watch videos, solve problems, look at diagrams, and draw pictures.
Also we made rubrics. We made rubrics for wave and ray diagrams. We had to write what was expected to do to get the best score possible. I also drew examples of a good drawing, an okay one, and a bad one. After that we had to use our rubrics to grade 4 different pictures.
Finally we learned some stuff about the eye. We learned how the light bounces off the image into our and how we see it upside down. Then we learned that our brain flips the image so we see things right-side-up. This was all to prepare us for our test on Monday.

How did you learn these science ideas?

This week we based most of our hypothesises on the one video we watched with a laser going through a glass prism. We saw how the light refracted down instead of to the right. This brought us to talk about the wave diagram and to compare the ray to the wave.

Why is it important to know this idea (What real world application is there)?

It is important to know this because one day I could have a child who has a science question. That question could be about wave and ray diagrams. They could ask me which is correct. Then i would think back to 8th grade science and explain to him/her that we don't really know which is correct because we have some proof for both.