Mr. Richards' Blog

In our Chemistry, Physical Science, and 7th Grade Science classes, we are working heavily on science projects. The students have designed their own projects and experiments and will be collecting their own data. In Physical Science, we have experiments ranging from lemon batteries, Alkaseltzer lava lamps, animal skull identification, music tastes and their relation to age and gender, popsicle stick engineering, ideal tastes of soda, angles to shoot a basketball from various spots on the court, and dissipation of energy from a bouncing basketball. In Chemistry, the students are working on factors affecting rabbits' ability to navigate a maze, chemical extraction of potato starch, lipstick and makeup chemicals, ideal saturation of salt in icewater to lower the temperature, ink chemicals, creating fuse lines, and other projects. Our 7th grade projects range from designing an aquarium and testing different aspects of fish habitat, building an indoor tornado out of dry ice, and ma...

Our elective period has ended and we are back to our core class schedule. A few highlights from our elective classes: Martial Arts We've been going strong in our fourth week of martial arts. Thus far, students have been practicing the forms of punching, several types of kicks, aikido, and jiujitsu. We've emphasized jiujitsu the past two weeks and have done a lot of rolling around on the mat. I'm also keeping a Wednesday evening practice that is open to the students or community who want to attend (from 4:00PM -5:00PM). I planned on having some pictures to provide, but will have to wait till our next session. Outdoor Leadership This last week we've focused on navigation, winter clothing, shelter building, animal sign, and starting fires in winter. Despite some troubles with students dressing for the weather, we did spend a lot of time outside. We built two survival shelters out in the woods, which the two groups took in different ways: the Taj Mahal, with s...