During the first week of October all students should be done studying Mt Saint Helens and most students should be done with the scavenger hunt. The scavenger hunt will need to be finished for homework for those who do not finish it in class. It’s not a hard activity and can be done at the library or at home if you have an Internet connection.
Here are some benthic macroinvertebrates we found last year in our creek.
We will be starting a physical science unit but we also have some water quality work to do before October 15. A representative from the North Olympic Salmon Coalition (NOSC) will be here on Tuesday, Oct 10, to teach our students about Chimacum Creek. By Thursday, Oct 12, and Friday, Oct 13, a team of three students from each class will need to help NOSC collect benthic macroinvertebrate samples from our creek to send to a lab. The samples are used to calculate a score that lets us know the biological integrity of our creek (see my week 5 homework page). After Oct 15 the sample will not count because as we approach winter the bugs are less plentiful. We will also need our film crew so they can begin documenting our process. While those activities are taking place the remaining students will continue to work on our physcial science unit as we study energy, machines and motion. This unit will take us all the way until March and even then we probably won’t get through even two thirds of the kit! We’ll do our best though.
