Mr. Gibson's Science Courses Web-Site

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CCS-Literacy-Wk One: Simple Wood   This link will take you to the article for this week. The goal for this article and the process overall is to make all of us competent readers. Simply put... if we cannot effectively read difficult non-fictional text... we will never be able to understand what is expected of us nor our roles within this complex world that surrounds us.

Initially we will be developing two tools to put in our "literacy tool-belt" - annotation & contextual deconstruction. This will begin with the article linked in this page-posting.

The article itself is a redacted combination of several articles used to "make a two-pronged point" - is "wood"... "simple" and could it ever have been "simple"? All four science disciplines will be using the same article this week for two reasons: (1) it contains related content specific referenced constructs that you have been studying in each of your classes and; (2) we need to develop our "tools" first. This article, very ACT/PSAE-like will allow us to accomplish our goals while giving you confidence on such "passages" that you will encounter on the standardized national tests.

So... let's get started and have some INTERESTING "oddity-fun" along the way!

Mr. Gibson

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CCS-Literacy-Wk 2: The Limits of "Small" & the Scientific Field of "Quanta"  By clicking on this link you can take yourself to the article for this week (w/o January 23rd). In this article we look at "How Small Is Small" in terms of both matter & energy (3 dimensions) -and- Time (4th dimension of our universe).

We also look at what happens when we might go below these "thresh holds" of these lower limits (quanta).

Read, circle the words & ideas of science that "confuses" you as well as the "other words" that confuse you. Use the table at the end of the article to make a list of each of these. Again, we will then think-pair-share seeing if someone in our group can explain those terms & ideas that confused us. From there, we will then see if the class at large can handle some of these confusion ideas left over from our redacted lists.

Last, we will go back and annotate each paragraph to see what all the "wah-wah-wah" is trying to tell us using this to research or contextually make sense of it all.

Mr. Gibson