Week 10 Blog

 In the lab this week, we began by talking about what it takes to be a good teacher and create good lessons. Ted talked about the importance of formative assessments for students throughout units, as well as when creating activities and lessons it is crucial that they are high-quality and engaging students. Furthermore, using pre-assessments and analyzing how much students learned throughout the unit is incredibly important. Measuring growth and learning as a teacher is a great way to make sure the class is productive and effective for students. After talking about the importance of learning, we went into more content for the unit, which includes what the Earth is made of. Also, how convection works. Convection includes hot material rising to the surface of the Earth and then sinking back down to the core as it cools. We finished the lab by making sedimentary, metamorphic, and igneous rocks. 

In the lecture this week, we talked all about volcanoes, beginning with the layers of the Earth. Also, we learned about the convection moving plates at divergent boundaries to form volcanoes. Furthermore, we learned about all the different plate tectonic movements, such as convergent and transform. Something interesting is how the islands of Hawaii were formed by a magma hot spot, and magma cooling as plates shift over time. Then, we moved on to the life cycle of rocks. We talked about this quite a bit during lab, so it was familiar information for me. 

This week's Press book reading went further into depth on the rock cycle and different rock forms. It discussed how the key parts of the rock cycle include heat, pressure, weathering, and erosion. Each rock passes through different phases and can change from one form to another depending on the conditions of the material. One key feature of a rock is that it must be made from natural material.