Who's Your Mummy?

Science
Seventh grade science began this week by creating mummies. Mr. Hoover's Social Studies class has been studying Egypt and we thought it would be interesting to learn the scientific process the Egyptians used to preserve humans called mummification. We created natron (sodium chlorine, sodium carbonate, and sodium bicarbonate) and placed a chicken wing and an apple into the natron. We weighed the chicken wing and the apple and recorded the weights on a data table. We will continue to weigh and record data for the next two weeks. Your children will observe that the chicken wing and apple become preserved as the moisture is pulled from the cells of the chicken wing and apple. This activity also gave us an opportunity to learn about tissues of living organisms! We observed muscle tissue, tendons, joints, connective tissue and epidermis. Your children are very excited about our body systems and the upcoming units for discovery!

The rest of the week was dedicated to Motion and Force. We learned about gravity and Galileo by dropped balls of different sizes and masses at the same time. This was a lot of fun and proved that things to fall at the same rate despite their size or mass. While studying gravity, your children were very interested on how much they would weigh on other planets. We calculated our weight on Earth and the moon (the moon is 1/6 our gravity). Ask your child how much they would weigh on the moon and how much their mass would change on the moon? Here is an interesting web site, http://www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/weight/index.html. This web site will calculate your weight on each planet. It is exciting to see what you would weigh on Venus! We were exposed to Sir Isaac Newton and his First Law of Motion. You children were able to observe that a body in motion tends to stay in motion unless a force acts on it. We used rolling chairs and 13 books to demonstrate that when a moving chair is stopped by a force, the books continue to move forward. Inertia, force, and momentum were vocabulary words we used this week. More great science experiments will be coming next week!