Hurricanes vs. Tornadoes

It was a little heated today in Science class as we debated the topic: Which is more destructive, hurricanes or tornadoes? Students chose a stand and gathered evidence of support from the AMSTI textbook. Two students from each side of the argument were given 1 minute to state the facts to the audience, as we wrote down the statements they made for their argument. Once both sides stated their arguments, "objections" rang out. We looked at each of the statements made by the debaters and determined whether their statements were fact or opinion. The debating team with the most convincing argument (the largest number of true facts) was...well, the team with the most convincing argument (sorry, guys, we were all winners with this one!) It was fun to see the students get involved in stating their case (some more passionately than others!) In the end, 3 out of 4 classes resulted with hurricanes being the most destructive. Only one class had a very strong argument for tornadoes.

After you look through our pics, feel free to weigh in with your arguments! We'd love to hear your views as well!

AMSTI

We finally began AMSTI this week! We have begun thinking about catastrophic events that take place around our Earth. We are thinking about where events take place, and why we think they happen there.

On Friday, we tossed around the globe to discover that our Earth is covered mostly by water (we already knew that, but it was fun to throw the inflatable globe around!) We explored various maps and globes and coded them with colored dots to represent where we think certain catastrophic events take place.

Feel free to leave comments for us about your ideas on catastrophic events!