Exams and Exam Preparations

Honors Physics took an extra day to prepare for tomorrow’s assessment on forces and laws of motion. The good thing about this chapter is that it uses skills that you practiced in previous units. The bad thing about this chapter is that it uses skills that you practiced in previous units, only they don’t tell you that directly. You have to be ever-vigilant for vector operations and for situations involving kinematics. Also, this chapter truly challenges you to read and understand a problem and then plan an effective strategy towards its solution. This will pretty much be the rule for most chapters we cover this year and it is good to get used to the habits of mind early on. Exam tomorrow and starting Chapter 5 on Thursday.

Physics B discussed conservation of momentum and how it stems from the concepts of impulse and Newton’s 3rd Law of Motion. Always keep in mind that in a collision, the momentum lost by one object is gained by the other object in the interaction, conserving the system’s total momentum. We’ll do some review of this and other topics tomorrow and your lab on Thursday will allow you to work in more depth with the concept of momentum. We should also have some time after the lab for exam review. Physical Science E discussed their lab investigations and the momentum practice problems assigned Friday. Take time this evening to rework those that you got wrong and analyze what type of errors you are making. We’ll complete our discussion of momentum conservation tomorrow and use the rest of the period, as well as the whole period on Thursday to review for Friday’s exam.

Physics F and G suffered through their Chapter 4 exams. Tomorrow, we build upon our concept of force to understand work, power and energy - all words with common meanings that differ from the scientific meanings.

Homework

Honors Physics: Study for exam
Physical Science B and E: 11.3 Section Review
Physics F and G: Practice 5A and 5.1 Section Review #1-4