Curriculum update - 6th and 7th grade science

7th-grade science students recently learned about communication and transportation systems. During this communication unit, students examined the key components of a communication system (source, encoder, transmitters, receiver, decoder, and storage) and identified which systems were best suited for a variety of scenarios.

 

In our transportation unit, students examined how transportation systems are designed to move people and goods using a variety of vehicles and devices. Additionally, students identified subsystems of a transportation vehicle. After reviewing transportation subsystems and the universal design process, students created a modification to a transportation vehicle to transport an 8ft tall snowman in July, in one piece, without melting!
The engineering portion of this unit challenged students to use the concept of systems engineering in order to model inputs, processes, outputs, and feedback to design a prototype to move goods across the classroom.

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In March, 6th-grade students wrote a letter, a speech, or an argument as Alfred Wegener's attorney, that used evidence to support Wegener's theory of continental drift. These creative pieces of writing were great - ask your students to see theirs!
More recently our 6th-grade students focussed on how fossils and layer of rock tell us the story of Earth's history. Students successfully looked at images of rock layers and could tell you what formed first, second and third and if there was an intrusion or a fault that cut across the layers. In addition, students could assess given fossils and indicate what the environment was like at the time, how it changed and what index fossils tell us about how old other fossils and sediments are based on their location!