Nicole had partially completed her vocab puzzle that was homework but got stuck, so I gave her a couple of hints so that she can finish it for homework tonight. Although this year will be mainly physical science, I will also be regularly relating it back to Earth, space, and life science, which Nicole had in 6th and 7th grade. Therefore, reviewing diverse content from previous years will be a regular part of of our curriculum. Last class I learned that Nicole didn't know the order of the planets, so I gave her the mnemonic device to help her memorize them. Today I checked her progress on this, and she still has some work to do. I will assess her on this next Tuesday, along with her nature of science vocab quiz. We talked about what science is, and added the 4 basic sciences to the vocab list: biology, chemistry, physics, and math. We discussed a bit about what each entailed and how all scientists use all 4 to study their particular field. Since we recently had a review question on the greenhouse effect on Venus, we discussed how the 4 sciences would apply to understanding this. We especially spent some time on chemistry- since we were talking about Venus's CO2 atmosphere, we looked at the periodic table and took some time to understand what "CO2" meant, and then related what we learned to "H2O" as well as the formula for glucose, looking at diagrams of each molecule. Finally, I encouraged Nicole to google "physical science projects" to help her start coming up with an idea for what topic she would like to do her science project on.