Blog
Saturday was a great day!!! It started out 82 degrees and gorgeous. And with little to no warning, like it was right on cue and had been sitting in last week's classes, a cold front rolled in. It was a textbook cold front with the right kind of clouds, (Do you remember?) a 25 degree drop in temperature, a downpour of precipitation, and even a little thunder and lightning. As I was thinkning about how I'd love to call each and every student, one of them called me, just to tell me they noticed!!! You can't believe how excited I was. Seeing science is really believeing. We all see it every day. Step back and look around and find some science right now. Are you surprised? Do you take it for granted? What can you learn from it? Take some time to make sense of what you've learned at school, because that's when you're really learning.
So, we have spent a little bit of time looking at our atmosphere and now how the sun's radiation "jump starts" our weather. The sun is a great friend to the earth. It keeps us warm and gives us light. It is also why we get to experience changes in weather. Look outside right now and imagine today, everyday with no changes in weather. Or, what about no weather at all. What would your day look like or feel like. (Don't forget to think about temperature, pressure, humidity, precipitation, wind.....) While we are complaining about this cold spring we are having we might want to consider something worse, and that would be no weather. What would that be like and what could that mean for living things?
Sorry that it has taken so long to write this next blog, but we've been busy in the computer lab doing those power points. You all did a great job. You can do so much more than what we had time for. Don't be afraid to play with it.
So as we leave astronomy behing we're going start exploring meteorology. This week we will be looking at our atmosphere. It is very different from the rest our solar system's planets. We have talked a little about air pressure and some gasses found on other planets and now we'll get a chance to really explore those things in depth. Our atmosphere holds our weather and we need to understand it before we can start trying to predict what is going to happen there. I am sure you will find this topic very interesting.
We had a good week learning some cool things about the terrestial planets. I am really amazed by all of your questions here and in class. Your minds are really working. There have been lots of "what if" questions......
"What if Venus were to explode?"
"What if we did make it to the black hole?"
"What if there were a supernova in our galaxy?
Great Job! These kind of questions come from GREAT SCIENTISTS!! Remember the next step in the scientific method is to make a hypothesis. So I keep on asking those questions, but be prepared..... I will be asking you,
"What do you think?".
