Ms. Hyche’s Class Blog

Yesterday was a great day in the Science classroom. Each student acted as a water droplet and experienced an “Incredible Journey” through the water cycle.  We all remember the water cycle, right? Precipitation, evaporation, condensation, and transpiration. Well, the students learned that there are so many more details to the cycle of H2O than just these four well-known steps. Water can change states among a gas, liquid, or ice at various places in the water cycle. It doesn’t always go in the order that we all may have learned in elementary school.

Ms. Whitfield and I set up the lab with nine different stations including: River, Glacier, Lake, Ocean, Groundwater, Animal, Plant, Soil, and Clouds.  Of course each student started with a yellow bead to represent the sun because afterall, it is the driving force of the water cycle. At each station the students would string a colored bead onto a piece of twine to remind them of their time there. As the students traveled from station-to-station, they had to record a reason as to why they went from say a cloud to a river, or maybe from a glacier to the ocean. Not all students would make it to the nine stations…..why? Some students would have to stay at cloud several times in a row. Why? Well, clouds are the result of evaporation of water condensing to form a cloud. When there is so much water vapor in the air, we will have some form of precipitation. However, if there is no precipitation, water vapor is remaining in the cloud. This explains why some students had to stay at certain stations longer than others.

Below I have posted my PowerPoint that I used to introduce the Water Cycle. If you were absent on the day we discussed this in depth, please refer to the slideshow below. I will be posting pictures soon of our “Incredible Journey” and will also post pics of our examples of transpiration.  Please wear your water cycle bracelets to school tomorrow. They may help you on your test!

Hope you all enjoyed this experience as much as I enjoyed watching you journey through the water cycle. I loved seeing you make connections and understanding why your water molecule took the path that it did. Keep it up 6th graders. YOU are our future scientists!

WOW! What a week at cheer clinic. I was amazed at all the girls who came to tryout and am proud of each of you for all of your hard work. Thanks for everyones’ participation and enthusiasm. I am thankful I wasn’t in the judges seat. Having said that, congrats to the 2009-2010 CMS Cheerleaders!

Rachael Abrams

Lakin Aycock

Kelly Chandler

Caycie Coyle

Makenzie Crysel

Ayla Dennen

Brooklyn Dodds

Erin Funk

Dasha Gubarev

Hannah Henderson

Desi Spring

Michelle Massey

Alana Nelson

Makenzie Walls

Hey guys and gals! You all did a fantastic job in English today with sharing your Pop Parts of Speech project. A lot of you chose your favorite song and made up words that taught the class about your designated part of speech. Some of you chose to put on a short play to teach us about parts of speech, and finally, a few of you did an upbeat cheer! I am impressed with the creativity you showed today…especially since I only gave you two class periods to plan for this! I will be adding your videos shortly. When watching, make sure you turn up your speakers all the way! The microphone on the camera didn’t pick up some of your voices as well as others. Have a safe and happy holiday and I will see you all on January 5th.

Hey guys and gals! I was sent this through an email and think it is AWESOME! Check it out. I checked it out though snopes and found it to be valid!

XEROX IS DOING SOMETHING COOL

If you go to this web site, http://letssaythanks.com/Home1024.html you can pick out a thank you card and Xerox will print it and it will be sent to a soldier that is currently serving in Iraq . You can’t pick out who gets it, but it will go to a member of the armed services.

How AMAZING it would be if we could get everyone we know to send one!!!

It is FREE and it only takes a second.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the soldiers received a bunch of these? Whether you are for or against the war, our soldiers over there need to know we are behind them.

This takes just 10 seconds and it’s a wonderful way to say thank you. Please take the time and please take the time to pass it on for others to do. We can never say enough thank you’s.

Thanks for taking to time to support our military!

I have my first guest bloggers! Thanks to Kathy and Olivia for blogging for our English classes. I just uploaded the voicethreads. All classes are here except for 3rd period. I need to go back and save your HTML in voicethread and put the setting on public. It is on private right now and will not work if I uploaded them on here. I will get these up here as soon as I get back from Hawaii. Have a great week kiddos!

Be sure to comment and view all threads.

Ms. Hyche

Hey This is Kathy!!!!!!!!!!

We just learned about demonstrative adjectives (this, that, these, those). Ms. Hyche came up with an awesome exercise for us. She divided us into groups and each group got a digital camera. Then she let us go into the hallway and take pictures. We wrote sentences telling about the picture. After that we got to do voicethreads. Voicethreads is when we got to record what we said so you can hear are wonderful voices !!!  Make sure to listen for me and Olivia’s ( the other blogger) voicethreads. Make sure to listen AND COMMENT to some voicethreads and visit Ms. Hyches’ blog!!!

~ Kathy

Hey everyone, Olivia here.

These past few weeks we have been learning about demonstratives adjectives. It was cool AWESOME! We did bunches of cool activities from taking pictures in the hall, to just sitting in the classroom and working on the active board. When we went out in the hall to take pictures we had an ah – mazing time. We took turns taking pictures with the schools cameras and then we wrote a sentence to go along with it. The sentence had to have at least one demonstrative adjective and one describing word. It was fun to go into the computer lab and the library to do voicethreads to go along with our sentences. Right now the voicethreads are on Ms. Hyche’s website/blog. It was cool to hear our voices on the voicethread. Make sure to check out me and Kathy’s [ shes writing another blog on the computer next to me] voicethreads :]

Yupper Doodles.

– Oliviaaa :]

Today is the Autumnal Equinox! We are only graced with an equinox twice a year, so I get very excited about this special day!

If you are in my science classes I am sure (or really hope) that you know the defintion of an equinox. However, for those of you who are reading this that aren’t in my class, I will do my best to make it short and sweet. During an equinox the sun is directly over the equator and the Northern and Southern Hemispheres will have equal amounts of daylight and equal amounts of nighttime. This always occurs around the 22nd of September (Autumnal) and the 20th or March (Vernal or Spring). This is basically the changing of seasons for both hemispheres. As we are beginning to tilt away from the sun and lose some of the sun’s radiation, the southern hemisphere is slowly tilting more towards the sun and is simultaneously heating up.

There has always been a MYTH that you can balance an egg on the equinoxes of each year because of gravitational alignment. Just for fun, our science class balanced an egg…..and did it successfully! However, I did test this experiment this summer and found with some patience (lots of patience) you could get the egg to balance and stand straight up.

It’s really a cool site to see an egg sitting straight up and look like it is barely touching the surface. The egg we balanced is still standing proudly on my desk. I will post pics of my classes with the egg for you to see. Don’t be fooled by my egg-clock, Bob. he is also in the picture.

I hope you guys go home and try this out yourselves. Please ask your parents permission first because I don’t want to be to blame if you have a gooey mess!!

Happy Autumnal Equinox everyone!

We have officially started our Storms unit!

We started by investigating vortices in a bottle and discussing how storms form.  We found that in the Northern Hemisphere storms with a vortex always rotate counter-clockwise and heat is needed to get storms brewing! We used beads and glitter to represent debris so we could see how heavier and lighter objects would move inside or outside of a storm’s vortex.

 In other investigations we studied different surfaces of earth and how those surfaces effected the temperature of air. We learned that the sun gives off radiation and directly heats earth’s surfaces; mostly water absorbs the sun’s heat. The remainder of the radiation is reflected. Students, do you remember why the sun’s radiation is reflected? Where do the radiation rays go when they are reflected? 

We also had an in-depth discussion about earth’s atmosphere and layered cake! Wait, what?! Yes! Layered cake. Our earth is like a yummy layered cake in that our atmosphere has many different layers, each with different characteristics and a variety of purposes. Students, in which layer do satellites and space craft fly? Which layer consists of our ozone layer? If I asked you to explain the Greenhouse Effect and talk about greenhouse gases, would you be able to do so? I sure hope so. You might see that on a test. Hint Hint.  

In our latest investigation we used punk sticks as a smoke source so we could visually see how air moves when it is cold and when it is hot. We used ice and boiling water for this inquiry and put each of these items inside a convection tube. From there we added our smoke source, the punk stick, placing it through a funnel. We then turned out the lights, turned on the flashlight, and watched our smoke billow and swirl! We even saw a few vortices! Students, go back and reflect how the cold air moved. How did the hot air move? Where did the cold/hot air come out in the convection tube? The top or bottom? Think of how this relates to the air around you!

I am posting pictures of the past few investigations we have conducted. Enjoy and feel free to leave comments. See you guys on Monday. I have missed you all and hated to be out sick!

As we all know a fragment is a broken off or detached piece of something, it is basically an incomplete part. Everyday on earth, we have fragments of asteroids hit our earth! Did you know that?? They are TINY pieces of asteroids, but you can find them in any crevice or crack on the sidewalk. If you are interested in how, just ask me in class. Back to fragments…..SENTENCE FRAGMENTS! A sentence fragment is basically an incomplete thought and was the topic in last week’s English classes.

We found that fragments are everywhere in today’s advertisements. However, this piece-y information can cause some confusion and relay inaccurate information to readers. So, in English we decided to look at some of these advertisements and create sentences from the fragments we found within the ads. We were hoping to assist readers in understanding the full meaning of the ads we observed.

In groups of two, the students were handed an advertisement that had anywhere from 1-4 sentence fragments.  The students were asked to identify the fragments, then turn the fragment into a sentence that supported whatever the advertisement was marketing.  For example, in an advertisement for Oatmeal, it simply stated Banana Bread. I got some really crafty sentences from students on this one. Parents, how would you perceive this simple message? How would you put it into a complete sentence to make the ad more clear to readers?

The students had about three minutes per ad, then were given a new ad to look at. Fellas, I must apologize again for the excessive amount of makeup/beauty product advertisements I had! Apparently, it is very common for makeup companies to use fragments in their marketing techniques. You guys look at the bright side! You learned a lot mascara and lip gloss! HA.

We had a good time making fragments into sentences, but also learned that incomplete thoughts or sentences may make it difficult for a reader to understand. Writers, please make sure all of your sentences have a complete subject and predicate. Remember to ask questions if you are unsure if a sentence is complete.

• Who or what did something? (missing the subject)
• What happened? (missing the verb)
• If you have to ask both sets of questions, you are missing the subject and the verb!

 Also, remember not to be fooled by imperative sentences. Even if they are just one word, they still have the understood subject of you.  Ex: Giggle. Is this complete?

Good work today guys and gals! I think that some of you may have a future in advertising. I have posted some pictures for you to enjoy!

Congratulations to the following girls for making the 2008-2009 CMS Cheerleading squad!

Anna Baginski

Desi Spring

Sara Byrd

Hannah Henderson

Dasha Gubarev

Erin Funk

Alana Nelson

Makenzie Walls

Bethany Henry

Emily Milligan

Taylor Suvarow

Maekala Williams

Caroline Lowell

Emily Wade