Yay Science!

In FE8B Science we have been studying hand tools that we are going to use in science this year. I feel it will be a really fun year because I love doing hands-on projects. Although, I have used hand tools before at my cottage making bird houses and I definitely prefer power tools! I used a screw-driver on my bird house and got so bored… I’m not a very patient person, so it will be interesting to see how this will work out…
We have also done some worksheets on WHMIS and HHPS symbols. If you don’t know what those are, check out http://www2.worksafebc.com/Topics/WHMIS/SymbolsAndLabels.asp?ReportID=24384 about WHMIS and http://www.perc.ca/waste-line/rrr/home/hazardous.html about HHPS. Anyways, we did a worksheet to find at least 3 products with HHPS symbols on them. I was very surprised at what I found! Febreze (yes, I mean the air-freshener) is explosive if it is heated, and in my cottage our bottle of Febreze was stored right beside the stove and across from the oven and microwave – NOT the smartest place to put something explosive! I can happily say I moved it to a safer place. Also, Lysol (a toilet bowl cleaner) is corrosive… I’m glad I don’t have to clean the toilets in my cottage! Finally, PAM (a cooking sheet spray) is explosive if it is heated, which at first I thought was hilariously stupid because you spray the PAM on a cooking sheet to go in the oven! But then I realized it was explosive because the PAM is compressed in the can and if the particles moved around any faster, like they would if they were heated, the can wouldn’t be able to contain them and then explode. So, therefore, PAM is safe to spray on a cooking sheet.
Finally, another worksheet we did was about a boy who got 4 fingers cut off and his forearm twisted around cleaning a meat mincing machine. That article definitely gave me a healthy fear for power tools – I would NOT want that to EVER happen to me!
Well, that’s it for now… Oh – by the way – what we are doing in Math is square roots, square numbers, and learning how to estimate the square root of a number that’s not a perfect square. We also started a unit about order of operations today.
Until next Wednesday,
-K