Tuesday, February 24th:

To continue our review of fraction operations, the students worked in groups to find how many Low-Tide Pizzas they could make from, say, 4 2/3 cups of sand, given the amount needed in for one pizza. This tested their ability to apply division in a complex context, and they were then able to test whether their calculation was correct. They continued to solve other word problems with these skills, and then took a quick skills assessment to see what they needed work on before the cumulative assessment at the end of the week. Tonight, Period 1 had 8 word problems that required various operations with fractions. Period 4 ran a bit long, so their homework was to finish the skills assessment in seminar.

In science, students played the role of organisms in the Yellowstone food web (with better materials this time), connecting themselves to other students based on food relationships. At the end, the students in Period 5 had built working food webs, and were able to test how important each animal was to the stability of the community by 'feeling the pull' as one student at a time pulled away from the group or dropped out of the community altogether. This led us to talk about what happens when a top predator like a wolf is eliminated, and ended by watching a fantastic 4 minute video laying out the positive impacts on the organisms and even the flow of a river when wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone in 1995.