Out of This World

Hey guys! Sorry for the late post, I had a volleyball game all the way in Waukegan. Happy to report that we crushed them, if you care. Anyways...we spent most of our day today working on the Periodic Table of Aliens activity in which we were given 38 different alien pictures arranged in a random order that we then had to arrange into a periodic table-type format with the rows and columns each arranged so that they contained one trait that remained exactly the same and one trait that consistently changed.

My partner, Mollie, and I first began by cutting all of the aliens out and separating them by body shape. We noticed that there were eight of each kind (except for two groups that had seven) and this was the number of columns there were supposed to be in the table. So, we began to arrange them into rows. We then noticed that for every one of the five types of body shapes the aliens were holding up the numbers 1-8, so we arranged them in numerical order. Once we had the five rows of body types and the eight columns of the numbers laid out, we started to notice a pattern in other areas such as the hair, legs, and feet. The traits consistently went from least to greatest depending on what body type they had. For example, all of the downward facing triangles had the largest amount of that trait; five spikes, biggest feet, six legs. So we arranged the rows by body type in the order of upward facing triangle, circle, rectangle, double circle, and downward facing triangle.

My final table looked like this:

There were two empty spaces in this periodic table fall in the last column of the second row, and the fifth column of the fifth row. Looking at the patterns of the chart, we discovered that the first missing alien would have a circular body, eight fingers, no hair, one eye, and three legs. The second missing alien would have a downward triangle body, five lines of hair, five fingers, two eyes, and two legs.

My drawing of the "next" alien was after the last row in the first column, and my alien was going to have six spikes, one finger, two legs, and two eyes. While I can be sure the alien will have these traits, i do not know what shape his body will be.

No need to compliment my artwork, I know its great. The final thing we had for homework tonight was to finish the metals, nonmetals, metalloids lab. The post lab questions are asking us to use our data to classify each of the elements we tested as a metal, nonmetal or metalloid. I found that checking my answers with a periodic table was very helpful. I found that aluminum, iron, magnesium, tin, and zinc were metals; sulfur and carbon were non metals; and silicon is a metalloid. Well, that is all for today guys! The next scribe is....Ben W!