Ms. Bearse's Site

It was a very hot day today, so we went for some math walks.  Here we found an engineer sporting a flipped visor.  They love dividing fractions, just like we do! (Flip da visor).  Queen’s students are in their frosh week activities now.

Visors are everywhere!

We found a frosh who was a KC student last year.  He had good advice for high school.

We walked around the perimeter of the field.  Some of us had energy to run.

We also showed the radius of the circle we found.

Math is everywhere!  

Today we used beans to do some math.

We talked about counting, and representing.  We had all sorts of ideas about how to determine how many beans there were without counting each bean.

Some counted groups of beans

Some made rectangles out of beans and multiplied the rows by the columns

Some measured the length of a bean, and the length of all of the beans in a line, and divided.
We started our bean investigation.  We put the beans in damp paper towel, and then into a baggie.

Our windowsill will soon be a garden!

We made estimates of how many beans will germinate, and represented that in a variety of forms.

We’ve learned lots about organic chemistry and today we used our knowledge to synthesize esters.  We made 3 different types.  One smelled like nailpolish remover, another like bananas, and a third like wintergreen mint.  

Today we are writing culminating math investigations in grade 9.   We are showing lots of graphing algebra and problem solving skills.

We are learning about organic chemistry, and are having fun making 3-D models of molecules to see what they look like.

Our beans are now large enough to eat!  

We successfully displaced silver from silver nitrate by using copper wire.  Our copper wire became much thinner during the experiment, and our liquid turned blue.  The silver we created was filtered out, and we did some calculations to determine the percent yeild of our experiment.

We are looking at what happens when you join the midpoints of sides for any quadrilateral, or triangle.  

We also are constructing hexagons to decorate the class wall.

Today we are doing a lab and showing off our skills with stoichiometry and electrochemistry.  We took the mass of a sample of copper wire, and added it to a solution that we made with silver nitrate crystals and distilled water.  Since we know the mass of the crystals, we can calculate the number of moles of silver nitrate we used.  We can predict the number of moles, and the mass of silver we’ll produce, and the mass of copper that we’ll use up.

Pretty quickly we saw evidence of a reaction!  We’ll see the full results, and finish the experiment tomorrow.

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Good job everyone!