8th Grade Units of Study
1. Chemical Building Blocks:
a) What is the nature of matter?
b) How are changes in temperature and particle motion related to the physical states of matter?
c) How is the periodic table organized
d) How is the periodic table related to your daily life?
Scientists: John Dalton, Dmitri Mendeleev, Ernest Rutherford, Marie Sklodowska Curie, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, James Chadwick, Enrico Fermi
2. Chemical Interactions:
a) How do compounds form?
b) What happens during a chemical reaction?
c) What are the characteristics of acids and bases?
d) Why does carbon have a central role in the chemistry of living organisms?
Scientists: Amedeo Avogadro, Svante Arrhenius, Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, Linus Pauling, Max Planck, Joseph J. Thomson, August Kekule, J. Robert Oppenheimer
3. Motion, Forces and Energy:
a) How can you describe an object’s motion?
b) What causes an object’s velocity to change?
c) How do the laws of motion influence your daily life?
c) How can you predict if an object will sink or float in a fluid?
Scientists: Sr Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrodinger, Pierre Simon de Laplace, Enrico Fermi, Blaise Pascal, Daniel Bernoulli, Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac
4. Plate Tectonics:
a) How is heat transfer related to plate tectonics?
b) How does the theory of plate tectonics explain the movement of continents?
c) What causes earthquakes and why are they unpredictable?
d) What causes volcanoes to form?
Scientists: Inge Lehmann, Charles Richter, Giuseppe Mercalli, Harry Hess, Alfred Wegner
5. Earth’s Weather and Climate
a) How are atmospheric conditions measured?
b) What causes wind and how do air masses affect weather?
c) How can weather be predicted
d) What is climate and how does it change?
Scientists: John Dalton, Gabriel Fahrenheit, William Ferrel, Anders Celsius, Wladimir Peter Köppen
6. Ocean Currents
a) How are density, salinity and temperature related to ocean currents?
b) What is the primary force that affects surface ocean currents?
c) How are ocean currents related to weather and climate?
d)How do ocean currents affect human endeavors?
Scientists: Mathew Fontaine Maury, Benjamin Franklin, Otto Pettersson, Vagn Walfrid Ekman, Wallace S.
5. Astronomy:
a) What events are caused by the motion of Earth and the Moon?
b) How do scientists learn more about the solar system?
c) What types of objects are found in the solar system?
d) What is the structure and composition of the universe?
Scientists: Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Nicolaus Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, William Herschel, Edwin Hubble, Arthur Eddington