Happy Memorial Tuesday! We did not have school yesterday, so there was no Math Monday prompt. Instead, we were given this one. Today's Science Solutions blog assignment is to explain the pathway that light takes to get to our eye starting from the cornea and ending with the brain.

When light hits our eye, it goes through the cornea and makes its way quickly to the lens of our eye. "Lens" comes from a Latin root that means "light", and as you might have been able to tell, it is what processes light. After going through the lens, the light goes through our eyeball at its signature speed until it becomes a signal. This signal is perceived by our brain as heat or color. Our minds, however, can only see and process a very small part of the electromagnetic spectrum of light. It uses this specified process to "read" the light. The signal spreads around your brain to let you know that what you're seeing is color. Sight is one of five senses, and in reality, all five of the senses are perceived by our brain because of the signals they trigger. Our brain works incredibly fast to have all five senses intact. 

This blog prompt actually ties in with our previous unit, which was on light and optics. I wasn't here for the test, so I have to take it tomorrow. This is one of my favorite things to learn about in science and it always has been. Like other concepts and material we've learned in Science, this subject can tie into many other ones. The mechanics of the brain are under the topics of neuroscience and neurology, even though we were studying optics at the time that we learned this. Another cool part about learning this sort of thing was the dissection we did a few weeks ago. We found an example of this principle using the eye of a sheep. Their eyes are built in a way that is similar to ours, and their brains send signals the same way that ours do. Right now we're doing another dissection, only this one does not tie into a greater unit; we're finding out how the inside of a frog works by doing a virtual and then a literal dissection. 

Good Wednesday! Today's off-schedule Science Solutions blog assignment is to reflect on yesterday's field trip to the Fresno Chaffee Zoo. We are to explain what we learned about our animal and if going to the zoo changed our perspective of it.

Well, the field trip was nice in some regards, but in the respect of actual learning about a specific animal, it was kind of disappointing. I loved going around to various exhibits and learning about other animals, but the plecostomus, my group's animal, didn't even have an exhibit. We think we might have found a spotted one in part of the rainforest exhibit, but there was no display information, and the zookeeper who was there informed us that they didn't know the fish's classification information. That kind of left the window open to curiosity, I guess, but I'm still unsure of whether it was a pleco or not.

I don't know how the lack of plecos at the zoo will affect our grade, but I have an uneasy feeling it might. Mrs. Poole explained to us that she already knew that certain animals couldn't be found at the zoo and to just go with the rest of our group, whose animals were the domestic alpaca and a type of peccary. So in that way, going to the zoo didn't change my perspective on my animal very much at all. Most of the fun yesterday was seeing the other animals and learning about them, as well as doing the many stations; I thought a lot of those were really cool!! We didn't focus on learning about animals all year in science, but I saw some hints about adaptations and evolutions in the information given at some of the stations. Overall, going to the zoo was educational and fun, even if a bit of a letdown in some respects. There are certain things about the field trip and project that I think could have been fixed, but some made the unit overall very memorable and rewarding. For the rest of this week we'll continue working on our zoo website and adding more information about the plecostomus to it. Unfortunately, I don't think that will change much. The value of our understanding, however, was improved on by the efforts of ourselves and our teachers, and I cannot thank them enough for that!!!!!!!!!!

Happy... Wednesday! Today's Science Solutions blog prompt is to explain how rainbows form and why they look the way they do.

Yesterday when I was in the library instead of CST testing, I looked up the answer in a book about optics. Basically, the answer is that the gases in the sky reflect off of the clear water droplets (rain), recreating a spectrum in the shape of a perfect half-circle in the sky. This is the same principle that we see applied in the famous picture of a prism refracting light. Of course, as with all colors, a rainbow has no infinite form and we only see it as such because it is all our eyes allow us to see. Make any sense?

This ties into the current unit we're studying, which is Chapter 3 and focuses on light and optics. In addition to learning the basics of color and light on the electromagnetic spectrum, we've also studied eyeballs and their functions a bit. In fact, on Monday, we dissected and examined a sheep's eyeball. Our test on the chapter is huge for our fourth-quarter Science grade, and it's this Friday! Yikes! I've already studied some of this, so really, I'm trying to become more well-versed on the subject.  Optics is really interesting to me. It seems small and hard to understand, but the functions of our eyes and the way we see and perceive light and things like rainbows and mirrors are all actually quite important.