Dr. Johnson's Reading Blog

Today we had a professor of organic chemistry from the University of South Carolina come to class and discuss all things chemistry, atoms, matter, etc. She also showed us how fun chemistry can be by performing several demonstrations of chemistry in action.  Ice cubes vs. dry ice Liquid nitrogen  Breaking a rubber glove after being submerged in liquid nitrogen

After debriefing with everyone about the trip, it sounds like everyone had a great time. The weather was beautiful, the food was great, and everyone challenged themselves in some way. Please remember that Thursday is a full day and Friday is a half day. There will be bag lunches on both of those days. I wanted to give you some information for this week. First of all, I'm not sending home a homework packet this week. But students have the option of working with Kahn Academy or their Prodigy accounts. Second, I am sending home our final sign up for carpool. Carpool will begin immediately after Spring Break (Monday, April 4). Please fill out at least 3 times your child can fulfill their carpool duties. As a reminder, carpool runs from 2:50 - 3:15. Please try not to pick up your child any earlier. This puts us in a bind when we have to quickly find someone to fill in the spot. If you absolutely have to get your child at, lets say 3:10, working back carpool may be the best since the

We have just finished up our study of mixtures and solutions. As we investigated the differences between mixtures and solutions, we also looked at how mixtures and solutions can be separated. The last several days we have worked on separating a mixture of gravel, iron fillings, diatomaceous earth, and salt. The task was to measure all these elements separately, combine them into a mixture, and use a variety of ways to separate the mixture back into its separate parts. Then students were expected to measure these parts again to see if they lost any material. In the pictures, students use a variety of ways to separate including screens, magnets, filters, and evaporation (which is not in the pictures because we are still waiting for full evaporation to take place). We are all very excited about our trip tomorrow. If anyone is interested, I will sporadically post pictures of your children at camp to our Twitter account, which is found here . See everyone bright and early tomorrow mor