Thursday, February 26, 2009

International news! Plane crash in Turkey!

Flight TK1951 was reported to fall out of the sky when it was only three miles away from a runway platform near an airport. There were 134 passengers on the plane excluding the crew, three pilots had been killed. In the plane, there were many Turkish and Dutch people and also 7 Americans, 3 Britons, one from Germany, Finland, Bulgaria and Italy. Joe Mazzone, a former Delta Air Force captain said everything looked fine as they were given clearance to land at 7,00 feet, but then the plane suddenly crashed onto the ground. Unfortunately, the cause of the plane crash was not told yet by the investigators. Also, this was the deadliest crash in the Netherlands since a vintage DC3 crashed in a shallow sea in September, 1992. Hopefully, the investigators find the cause of the crash and fix it on other planes so this does not happen again!

If you want to read more about this plane crash CLICK HERE!

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Friday, February 6, 2009

Class response

Roller coasters are fun to ride at big amusement parks, but now i know why it takes the engineers so many years just a build a small one. In class we have to build a roller coaster using toilet paper rolls for the tracks, boxes to help the roller coaster stand up, and a marble, which is our colorful roller coaster. Instead of using electricity that pushes a roller coaster up a hill, we just start the beginning of our roller coaster as a hill (which doesn't have a climbing part). Our particular roller coaster starts off as a hill without a climbing part with a steep beginning only because our roller coaster climbs another hill again with the force it starts off with. Next, our roller coaster flies off the tracks and lands into another set of tracks with a paper funnel to make sure the marble lands into the right spot. After going through the funnel, we built a loop for the marble which finishes off with the marble landing into a cup. While doing all of this we also had to make sure we had enough "omega" dollars to buy supplies, which is money that teachers give you when you behave well. This experiment was very fun and I hope to do more experiments like this again!

Here is a cool website with an example of what we did - only a lot better!

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

State: NJ's school report card isn't going to make it's parents happy!

New Jersey's middle school students don't look like they are straight A students this year! "About 30 percent of the 7th graders failed language arts and 35 percent failed math." Many middle school students didn't make it past the proficient grade for the NJ ASK. A third of all the students failing language arts and math, that's not good. What the NJEA should do is give a better learning curriculum to the teachers. I think the teachers of my school are excellent, but maybe the teachers of other schools aren't as great. "The change in scores is part of a conscious effort to identify middle school students who might need extra help preparing for high school." I do not think this could help at all. If a teacher is good at teaching and can help a student with problems, the student will be a smart person. Whatever happens, however, is the NJEA's decision.

Click here to read the article



Click here to see NJ's report card