After reading the book, "Compost Stew" we have decided to try and make our own compost. You should have received a medium sized ziploc bag and this little note home telling you what items your child can put into their bag to try and make their own compost stew. After a couple of weeks, we will be spreading our compost on the school flower beds to help the plants grow. :)
We continue to enjoy creating with STEM bins and are so happy you were able to see what all the fuss was about last week! :)
Our first day back after spring break was all about science! We had fun experimenting with some glow sticks and water temperature to see what happened to the brightness of our lights. For details - ask us what we found out! :)
We just couldn't get enough science this week! On Friday morning we talked about coding. Just like letters are a type of code when we're reading and writing, our little Ozobots use colour to help them understand what to do. We used four different colours of markers and coding instruction sheets to help us design pathways for our Ozobots to run on. Luckily, Mrs. Bordian was able to borrow these amazing little robots from District Office for us to work with. We don't have to return them until Tuesday, so we will be exploring with them again on Monday. :)
Our field trip on Monday was a great success! Thank you to Ryan, our presenter from Teachers Pet, and to all of our parent volunteers for making it run so smoothly! We learned so much about light and sound!
We love getting our morning work done (writing our agenda message and thinking about something we're grateful for) so we can spend some time creating with our STEM bins before heading off to word work each day...
One of this week's STEM challenges was to create something that can transport something else. The kids came up with so many great answers! Everything from people to backpacks, suitcases, cars, planes, trains and even a portal!
We are still busy creating each morning using our STEM bins! This week we had two challenges in addition to time to create freely. One was to build a house and the other one was to build the Eiffel Tower (this was inspired by our friend Ryder in 2Y who shared his LEGO version with us that he had built with his dad).
We have really been enjoying exploring materials through the STEM bins Mrs. Bordian put together for our classroom! :)
In Science this week, we talked about how people and animals prepare for winter and came up with our own Hibernation Stations! Above are the criteria and materials that we were given to work with. :)
It was a long week of indoor recesses, but we had fun in Science! We sorted our materials in many different ways, and learned about the difference between natural and processed materials...
For those of us who weren't home sick last week - we started testing our bags of materials that we brought from home. Our first three tests included measuring length, mass and looking at whether or not a material was transparent or opaque.
We are having fun learning about materials in Science this week! We worked on answering the questions: What kinds of materials are there? and How can we combine materials to make objects?
After reading Sky Color, we also wondered where different colours come from and what colours they are made of. We remembered primary colours (red, blue and yellow) and how they made secondary colours (purple, green and orange), but we weren't really sure about what colours made up the colour black.
We did an experiment using black markers on coffee filters and placed it over a cup of water with a pipe cleaner to help draw the water up and found out to our surprise that black is made of all the colours!
In Language Arts/Science we made our very own creations after reading "The Most Magnificent Thing" by Ashley Spires. We then drew and/or wrote about our inventions. Afterwards, we had so much fun building that we continued creating for the rest of the week during free time. :)