Guest Speaker: Ms. Luisa & Water Treatment (Written in Small Groups)

Group #1: N.R.'s mom came and taught us about clean water and dirty water, because she is a water engineer. Since she studies water, she taught us that dirty water can look clean but still have mini-germs in it that can hurt you, so we have to be careful what kind of water we drink. It was exciting seeing slides of different "vacirias" (bacteria).

Group #2: Ms. Luisa had E. B. put a chemical in the dirty water called alum, and it made the dirt in the dirty water get together like magnets sometimes do. She helped us understand how this works by having a bunch of us pretend to "not like" each other and then, after we had alum put on us, we did a big group hug. We also learned that when things come together like this, it's called "coagulation". So, once the dirty water gets in together in balls, it falls to the bottom of a container and then it's easier for the cleaner water to be poured off from the top. N.R. said, "It was my mom that did this (presentation), and I felt proud of her because she did such a good job!"

Group #3: Later E.P. put dirty water in a filter that had sand on top of small rocks, and it let water come out of the bottom. When E.P. put the dirty water in the the top of the filter, it went through the sand and came out as CLEAN water! But it wasn't so clean, because there could still be some germs inside of it. So then we put in another chemical to clean the water, and it was called "chlorine". Still we didn't drink this really clean water, just in case. There could have been "jiaryas" (Giardia)!
Group #4: At the end of the lesson we made a pretend filter that takes salt out of water. We have lots of salty water on our planet, so it's a good invention to learn how to take the salt out so that we can have more to drink. We learned that there's very little clean water on our Earth!  We were also given an activity book to teach us more things, and we especially learned not to waste water! It was a cool lesson.

Parachute Math & Felix Baumgartner's Upcoming Jump From the Edge of Space!

Apollo 13 & Engineering Design: Thinking Outside of the Box (Literally)

We learned about Apollo 13 and how the Lead Flight Director, Mr. Gene Kranz, helped save the mission. We watched the Apollo 13 movie about the astronauts James Lovell, Fred Haise and John Swigert. Pablo’s favorite part of the movie was when the astronauts almost ran out of clean oxygen, because he learned how to solve a problem like that in a spacecraft. The solution was to make the air filter from the Service Module fit the air filter in the Lunar Module (they were different shapes), and they called this invention the “mailbox”.

          After that we did an engineering project, just like the “mailbox” design, and we had to make two different shapes fit together. We knew if our individual designs worked when we were able to get a ball to lift up, by blowing into a tube that we made (see picture).  This project helped us learn about Engineering Design. First our teacher gave us a question (make two different shapes fit together), then we drew our ideas, we made our ideas, and then we tested them. If our design didn’t work, and the air didn’t go through the tubes and lift the ball, then we had to try again. Emilio had to keep re-designing his idea like 15 TIMES until it worked, BUT he never gave up…just like when Gene Kranz said that, “failure is not an option!”

At the end of this project we wrote letters to Mr. Kranz and Lauren’s mom is going to mail them for us! We hope he reads our letters and writes us back!