Chromatography

Another day of tough love.  My class's latest lab reports from the mixture lab were due yesterday.  Since I didn't remind them about it on Friday, I gave them an extra day to do it so they were due today.  And they still didn't have them finished!  They've figured out that the vocab words are in the back of the book... but they didn't think to read the chapter to find the answers to the other questions!  They'd say, "Miss H, I need help."  Okay, what do you need help with?  "I don't know where to find the answer for this."  Okay... did you look in the chapter?  "...(pause) No."  Well that's what you should do then.  "Can't you just tell me the answer?"  Sigh.  Then they rebelled when I made them stay in from recess to work on it.  "I'll just do it tomorrow."  No, it's due today; you have to finish it now.  One student still didn't have it finished by PE time.  Since PE is a class, she couldn't just stay in and work on it.  She asked if she could take it home and do it tonight.  The answer was yes, but there are going to be points docked since it wasn't handed in on time.  Then she wanted to call her parents and ask if she could stay after school to finish it.  But it didn't work for her to do that.  So, docked points it is. 


The chromatography lab turned out pretty good.  We could see a bunch of colors separated out, but not the rainbow I was expecting.  Red ink had red and light red and pink.  Blue ink had dark blue and light blue and almost a purple.  Black had yellow (surprise!) and blue and another blue.  It would've been cool to do a whole rainbow of colors.  Maybe next time.  We dumped all our alcohol/ink mixtures together into the dump bucket and thought, huh, what would happen if we did a chromatography separation on that liquid?  So we did!  We set up two trials and they are sitting on the lab table overnight. 


The coolest part of the day was a little accidental.  I opened up some mail that had been sitting on my desk for a while and found some magazine samples (Scholastic Science News, Math News).  One was on ebola (something one of my 6th graders is fascinated with), so I handed it off to him right away (he was overjoyed).  Then they found an article about these new inventions inspired by animals.  One is an underwater vehicle designed to look/act like a crab to explore the ocean floor.  It's pretty cool.  Well, the two boys reading the article had an argument over the picture.  One thought it was real, the other thought it was photoshopped.  What to do?  Ask Miss H. 


I wasn't quite sure (at first it looked real, but the water seemed too clear to be an actual photo), so we did some digging on Google.  None of the pictures looked firmly either way.  We discovered the exact picture used in the magazine... but with captions overtop the parts of the Crabster.  Our conclusions were that real pictures were used to create the animated "fake" picture used in the magazine.  Then the 6th grader found a video about the crab-vehicle invention... no words, just animated video showing what the Crabster could do.  You can watch the video here.  The whole class took a break from their normal Daily 5 activities and crowded around my computer to watch the video.  Very cool teachable moment!




We had another NLSW planning meeting after school, mostly ironing out details.  I think we're set!  Now it's on to the first Lenten service of the year... the 8th graders are serving chili and chicken noodle soup.