Hi everyone! Welcome to another fabulous year of science at BAM. I'm excited to be back at BAM for my fourth year. I'm also really proud of last year's 5th graders for all their hard work on the CST (which is not easy!)

Here's the scoop in science:

A letter went home two weeks ago in Thursday folders that detailed our science program. It included information about the curriculum, pacing, class pet, grading, contact info, schedules, etc. If you'd like a copy of this, please email me at caitlinjenkins@berkeley.net.

5th Grade Update: The students have started our physical science unit. We've been discussing mixtures and solutions and how to separate them. Today, we also saturated a salt-water solution.
Questions to ask your student:

• What mixtures (natural and human-made) can you name? Can you think of an example with all three states of matter - solid, liquid, gas? 
• What is a solution? How do you know the solution is saturated? How do you separate a solution back into a solid and a liquid?
• For later in the week: What is the difference in saturation of a salt water solution vs an Epsom salt water solution? 

4th Grade Update: The fourth graders have been investigating the properties of magnets. We discovered that magnets are attracted to iron and steel, and attract and repel each other based on the orientation of their poles. Today, we measured how the magnetic force between magnets decreases with distance. We'll follow up this activity with graphing to help us with our conclusion and then work on detecting the magnetic field of the earth.
Questions to ask your budding scientist:

• What objects are magnets attracted to?
• How does the orientation of the poles affect the magnets' behavior?
• As the magnets became further apart, how was the magnetic force between them affected? 
• What happened to the magnet when we attached a string to it and hung it from our tables? Why?