Alien Independent Study Task

For Mr Lawrence you can choose to do this homework task instead of the Extinction one described below. Whichever one you choose it should be completed by the end of this term.

Your mission is to produce a timeline about exploring  space.  The time line starts on 4 October 1957 and you need to list the significant events up to the present day.  Once your timeline is complete identify what you think are the five most important moments and describe them in detail.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_exploratiAAon is a good starting place.  Remember that cutting and pasting pages from the net is cheating.  It is officially called plagiarism.  Your task is to sift through all the information and turn it into your own work. Decide how you will present your work.  It could be a large poster, a power point or word document or maybe a video like a TV documentary

Forensics Independent Study Task

Your task is to research the answers to the following questions and produce a colourful A3 poster which illustrates what you have found out.

• Who discovered that fingerprints could be used to identify people?
• What causes fingerprints?
• How are fingerprints classified?
• How do forensic scientists take fingerprints at a crime scene?

Using the internet.
At the time of writing Wikipedia is an excellent source of information about fingerprints. However, it is very extensive and contains more information than you need. You will have to read it and summarise parts of into your own words. Do not copy and paste or print off sections. This is called plagiarism. It is a form of cheating and it has caused students at university to be thrown off their course when they have pretended that the work they hand in is their own. Don’t get into bad habits.

Mrs Tolputt will let you know when this work is due to be completed. 

Extinction Independent Learning Task

There have been many times in the past where the fossil record shows mass extinctions. This is where large numbers of species seem to be wiped out in a short space of time. As always in Science, there is plenty of debate about these events, however the mass extinction that gathers most interest relates to the disappearance of the dinosaurs.

Go to http://www.universetoday.com/39801/k-t-boundary this website discusses two competing theories regarding the extinction of the dinosaurs. Use this and other websites to produce a table like this;

Use this table to prepare a presentation where you state which theory you think is correct and why. Your presentation could be;

• a piece of writing which could be read out,
• a video of an interview with a friend asking searching questions of you,
• a PowerPoint presentation

or you could think of others ways of getting your opinion across. Remember, you must back up your opinion using Science.

You should have your work ready to present to the class on Thursday 31st March. 

Independent Homework Tasks

The idea behind Independent Study Tasks is explained by Mr Nicholls - Head of Science - as follows:

Each task is designed to take 3 hours, this is probably best achieved by splitting the activities into 30 minute chunks. They are designed to go beyond the Key Stage 3 curriculum and look at Science in its wider context including the history of Science, Science in the home and ethical issues presented by Science.

Each activity makes great use of the internet. Each site has been vetted as suitable for use by students. However, this does not mean students cannot find their ways to unsuitable sites or that pop – ups and the like do not appear. It is strongly recommended that parents, carers or other suitable adults supervise students when they use the internet.

Students will present their work to their peers. The class members will assess each piece of work and provide feedback based on “what went well…” and “even better if…” as well as deciding on the best three pieces of work. The top three will receive a certificate and be put forward to the end of year awards. At the end of year awards the best piece of work for each module will win its author a £10 book token.

Testing Ice Cores

We've been looking at evidence which scientists can use to find out about how the atmosphere has changed over the past 15 thousand years. One important method is to drill into the deep ice in the Arctic or Antarctic and pull out an 'ice core'. This can be cut into slices, where the slices from deeper down are older.

In our practical we used Universal Indicator (green in neutral solutions, red in strongly acidic solutions and yellow in weakly acidic solutions) to work out how much 'Carbon Dioxide Remover' needed to be added to a melted ice core before all the CO2 was removed. Here are some pictures of the class at work:

The equipment you can see in the photos includes beakers, graduated pipettes (these have a scale on them allowing you to work out the volume of the solution added) and the Universal Indicator in a small bottle.

Extinct - Mammoths lessons 1

Our new topic looks at how scientists obtain and analyse evidence about the past, and how they communicate their ideas to each other and to the public. You will be playing the part of a trainee journalist, who is first called to the finding of a baby mammoth, frozen in the Siberian ice for 15,000 years!

Here is the 'Walking with Beasts' episode we watched a few minutes of in our lesson:

The Wandering Mammoth