BOOBY! yup, the kids discovered the photo of the blue-footed booby in their textbook. That was a lot of fun (smirk).

Well, surprisingly enough, I had a pretty good day. I have my 7th graders designing a bird for a wrap-up of adaptations before we get into natural selection and evolution. I think they do get the fact that organisms are adapted to their environment and if the environment changed they might die.

For my focus question today, I asked them to list 3 adaptations of a whale (we discussed, albeit briefly, the evolution of whales yesterday, so thought was a good question). Boy, talk about your teachable moments! Kids in each class said something about gills. It took a while to convince them that not only are whales NOT FISH, but THEY ARE MAMMALS. I figured I might as well go all the way, and talked about baleen and how toothed-whales (what, they have teeth?? what, dolphins are whales??) used sonar/echolocation to locate and capture prey. One kid even asked if I was making it up!!

Introduced Newton's third law to my 8th graders. They are getting more and more chatty; maybe I'm just getting less and less patient???

I don't know if I want to cover astronomy after Newton's Laws or bouyancy. The teacher I leech off of is doing astronomy, which would be fun since we will be making rockets next week. It might be nice to teach the kids something that they find interesting.