Today we got to finish our presidential glogs that we have worked on for a while. They are supposed to tell the readers about some of the positive things about our candidate while also teaching us about to be descriptive. Each person made a glog and all of them are different. Some of the hard things to get on the glog were the Kelly for President sticker and the Kelly for President buisness cards. It was hard to download the files and get them on there but it was fun. I enjoyed making the whole glog! Soon we are having our primary election.

     I think leaves change color because the tree is sapping the nutrients out of the leaves to have a burst of power to last the winter. Possibly they change color to protect themselves from frostbite and to feed all their nutrient to the tree to keep it alive.
Green leaves show that the tree is still making food using photosynthesis.
Orange and yellow leaves show that the chlorophyll process is breaking down and orange and yellow pigments, called carotene and xanthophyll  cause the leaf to turn orange and yellow.
Red leaves are caused by anthocyanins, another type of pigment in the leaf. As the chlorophyll process is breaking down the anthocyanins pigment starts dominating and turns the leaf red. Anthocyanins also protect the leaf from sun damage.
A brown leaf is caused by waste products trapped in the leaf.

For Mr. Badynee's birthday everyone in Mr. Solarz class sent him an E-Card to show him our thanks for being a great principle. We are all thankful to have him as a principle because he has done great things for Westgate to make it safe and fun! He is important to us because without him I don't think Mr. Solarz would be able to teach in a 21st century way or use electronics as much because I don't know any other principles that is as nice as him (No offense because I'm sure there are other great principles). Keep up the great work!!!:)

Today we went to a Historical Reenactment Trip at Olive Mary Stitt School. We went around in stations to see all the characters in the Reenactment.
In the picture above it shows Captain David. He told us how when the the people first arrived in America and were native to England and ruled by King James they got land and food and women could own land too. The non-colonists did not get land so men must buy it and women could not own land at all.
But, eventually when the non-colonists needed backup forces in the war they promised the colonists land and food if they helped.
One of our other stations was about Angus Macclean. He was a carpenter and he told us about how he made roofing and how he used flint to dig out wood bricks to make bowls.
The bowls had tiny holes in them and sometimes food would get stuck in the crevices and it would rot. Then someone else would eat out of it and collect the rotted food in their mouth and get mouth rot.

One of the other stations was the wigmaker's station. Her name was Laura Goode or something like like that and she showed us how she made a wig/powder a wig. She told us how some wigs were made of real human hair and some were made of goat or yak hair. She told us how she puts a clay mask on the person who wants their wig powdered (particularly the males as in the 1800's men wearing wigs was not uncommon) and then powdered their wig. The mask kept the powder from getting in their eyes. For the whole trip it was very, very, fun!

Today we did an experiment with insulators. We had a bottle filled with warm water and the objective was to create a secure bottle that didn't let the heat out.
We covered the bottle with a sock, cloth, plastic wrap, and bubble wrap. Then we stuck temperature probe in it and put the bottle in the cold bucket of water.
Our starting temp was 39.4 degrees Celsius. We ended with the temp as 35.8 degrees Celsius. Even though the temp only dropped 3.6 degrees Celsius I think we could've added  more insulation to the bottom half because only the bottom half was under water and we only added a small padding to make the temp stay the same. But, all round our insulator was pretty good at keeping the heat in.

There is not much more for me to say about tessellations except that making them is fun. You can pick a dull, boring shape and transform it into an awesome tessellation. For this one I used a triangle and just stretched it randomly. I tessellated it and added these colors and got this. I didn't have time to explain the others.

I used a triangle for this one and stretched it out to the side and created a sideways triangle. I then tessellated it and got this. I wanted it to look like a bumblebee pattern and added yellow and black to get the tessellation's final look.

P.S. Look at the blog under this to find what a tessellation is.

For this tessellation I started with a square and fixed the edges to go inward. I didn't know what the final picture would look like and just decided that the starting shape looked cool. I tessellated it and got this picture without the color. After that I added yellow and orange color to it and finished with this.

P.S. Look at the blog under this to find what a tessellation is.

Today in math class we learned about tessellations. A tessellation starts out as one shape and you add shapes onto it, like I did. You can create different shapes by changing the angles/corners of each shape and give them color to add on. One of rules for tessellations is that they cannot leave gaps. After that we went on a website and created our own tessellations. (I created this one)

Today we got to do Mad Libs in class because we finished learning about "Parts of speech" like pronouns, nouns, verbs, and adverbs. The Mad Libs helped us (in a fun way) to learn about how and where we would use verbs, pronouns, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs because they give you choices about which word to pick for a certain category, like verbs. On the paper version it tells you what category it wants a word from and you pick the word but it must be in that category like a verb= bouncing. Each of us went on a website to make different Mad Libs. It was really helpful!

Today we learned about good insulators and bad insulators. We now know that a good insulator keeps the heat in (plastic wrap, aluminum foil, ect.) while a bad insulator (a good conductor) lets heat transfer through.
We tested this by putting warm water in a bottle and putting a good insulator (we used wax wrap) around the bottle of warm water.
Then we put the bottle in a bucket of cold water. What was supposed to happen was that the warm water temperature would not change and the cold water temperature would not change if the material we used was a good insulator. Although most of the temperatures dropped we had lot's of fun!