Sherlock Holmes first appears in the story    A Study in Scarlet in 1887 and for the last century and a half has fascinated readers with his brilliant mind and deductive skills. In class today students read an excerpt from A Study in Scarlet and annotated the piece to show how Holmes (and author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) used the scientific method to solve crimes. Embedded in the text, you can easily determine Holmes's question, hypothesis, experiment, results, and conclusion. Through Sherlock Holmes, Doyle created a paradigm shift in police work and modern forensic science is directly descended from those stories written more than 100 years ago.

I hope you had an excellent thanksgiving and engaged in many chemical and physical changes in the kitchen.  Today we reviewed chemical and physical changes with a jeopardy game as well as discussed possible careers in chemistry like forensic science, which is featured in the video to the right. Tomorrow we begin our final project regarding chemical and physical changes.

To celebrate American Indian Heritage month, today we discussed Indigenous contributions to science. We focused on the recent detection of gravity waves by Corey Gray, a Blackfoot scientist working for LIGO in Washington state. It's been recently announced that Gray and his team are being awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work in detecting gravitational waves. Click HERE to listen to Corey Gray talk about their discovery. A special moment in class was watching a recording of Mr. Gray's mother, Sharon Yellowfly, reading the press release for the discovery of Gravitational Waves in the Siksika (Blackfoot) language.


​

Today we continued modelling molecules with ball and stick models as well as began color-coding our own periodic tables. That's all the chemistry we'll get to before Thanksgiving because tomorrow we have a special activity to begin our holiday break.

Today's class comes to us like the original Star Wars Saga; in three parts. We started class with a little competition as students tried to write down as many different elements and compounds as they could from the music video for Meet the Elements by They Might Be Giants. Then we broke into three teams and rotated through three stations, Physical and Chemical Change Practice; Periodic Table Scavenger Hunt: Molecular Modeling with Ball and Stick models. We will continue these activities tomorrow, our lab sheets are attached for download.

Today students finished up the rest of the lab stations for our chemical and physical changes lab. Afterwards we discussed our results from each station and also watched Crash Course Chemistry: Periodic table. If you missed the labs, you can watch a version of each of the experiments in the video playlist below.