Weekly Blog 1/18/16 Rivers Unit

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Summary:After finishing every one's erosion presentations we learned about the parts of a river and where they normally are on a river. We started off by labeling the main parts of a river together, the source, tributary, confluence, meanders, and the mouth. The source is where the river begins, there may be more than one. The tributary is a small portion of water that joins the main river. The confluence is the area where the tributary joins the main river. The meanders are the bends or turns in a river. The mouth is where the main river enters another body of water. Some other parts of a river are a v-shaped valley, a waterfall, an alluvial fan, a floodplain, levees, an ox-bow lake, and a delta. A v-shaped valley is a valley whose slopes make the shape of a v. A waterfall is a drop in the bed of a river making the water to drop down vertically. An alluvial fan is a fan or half circle shaped mound of sand and gravel, alluvium. A floodplain is flat land on either side of a river that gets flooded when the river overflows. Levees are mounds of sand and gravel piled up at the river's edge. An ox-bow lake is a usually c-shaped body of water that was once meander in the river, but now is separated. A delta is an area of sandy and muddy sediment built up into the open water where a river flows into another body of water. Labeling the parts of a river started us off then we continued the river discussion with different types of sediment that can be carried. We did a mini lab on what materials, sand, gravel, and clay, took the most energy to move. After the mini lab my results showed that gravel settled first, sand second, and clay didn't even start settling, even after class ended. Analyzing my results showed me that that gravel takes the most energy to move and clay takes the least, with sand in the middle. The results made sense to me, but it was new information. This week was very informative.

SP6: Constructing explanations and designing solutions: I constructed an explanation of different parts of a river when I annotated images of rivers. I explained that I knew where different parts of belong by labeling images. Using the pictures to show my knowledge helped me understand, not only how the part of the river looks, but what it does and how it works with the rest of the river. Normally in case we don't label like how we did, but I feel we should do it more often because labeling parts as a class and with my table (I feel) will really help me remember where the parts of a river belong. Labeling also helped me remember the definitions, just by looking at the labeled picture I can remember what the definition and explanations are for the term or part off the river. I feel annotating helped me a lot.