innovation day!

A huge ‘kol ha’kavod’ to JK for their first innovation day! What a fun morning! Thank you to all of our guests for popping in to experiment with us!

Leading up to this morning, JK was heavily invested in learning about what makes objects sink or float. They learned about density, and even conducted an eggsperiment – no, wait, an experiment – to change the density of water so that an object that sank (an egg haha) was now able to float! Check out the booklets your children brought home in their backpacks to re-create the experiment at home! Their main challenge was to build a popsicle stick raft to get their dinosaur across the water table. As the joke goes… Why did the dinosaur cross the river? To get to the other side.

    

upcoming events!

We’ve got some exciting things happening here at OJCS that will carry us to the end of March! See flyers below for more details.

Wednesday, March 20th: Innovation Day
Please join us in our classroom from 9 am to 9:45 am to experiment with us and hear about our scientific investigations!

Monday, March 25th to Thursday, March 28th: Ruach week!
No school on Friday, March 29th.
There is a Grade 8 raffle happening that week as well, see flyers for info on ticket prices and prizes!
Here are the daily themes:
Monday: Our class costume theme is “מה שבא לי”. Borrowing from one of the themes of the Purim holiday, ״ונהפוך הוא״, we are taking a phrase that we have worked hard on flipping around – ״לא בא לי״ – and are flipping it into “מה שבא לי”! This is also the day we visit the school wide Purim carnival, please see the flyer below asking for donations of gently used toys for prizes.
Tuesday: Tacky Tuesday. Wear your most mis-matched clothing!
Wednesday: Wild West! Yee haw cowboys and cowgirls! Let’s practice our cowboy hustle!
Thursday: PJ Day, also dress down day! Bring your toonies and loonies in support of the Humane Society!

Innovation Day 2023

What an awesome morning we had, continuing our explorations of density and our sink or float investigations. We kicked off our week by following the scientific method. We asked a question (Will it sink or will it float?), made predictions (hypotheses), conducted experiments, made observations, and discussed our conclusions (what we learned).

We then started discussing density: What is it? Can we see it? How does density make something sink or float in water? We used bingo stampers to show what density looks like: lots of dots very close together means more dense, and dots that are farther apart are less dense.

We experimented with all kinds of objects that we found around our classroom. This morning we got to test out our hypotheses/predictions with our guests!

Then, we progressed to asking if we can change the density of water so that an object that previously sank would now float. We tested it out with an egg (an egg-cellent egg-speriment, if you will). We discovered that eggs will sink in water. We talked about how we can try to change the density of water by adding something to the space between the “dots” (from our density art). We poured in some salt, and let it dissolve and the egg… SANK! So we added more salt. LOTS. And the egg still sank! Because we are great scientists, we didn’t get discouraged, and we didn’t give up! After our guests left, we added EVEN MORE SALT and finally…. The egg FLOATED!!!!

If you’d like to recreate the egg-speriment at home, we highly recommend using a tall glass.

The inspiration for our experiments came from learning about the story of Passover, when baby Moses floated in a basket along the river. We also noticed that we were using salt water for our egg-speriment, just like we have salt water at our seder! JK didn’t want the experiments to stop, so, tomorrow they will be bringing a package to use at home. Send us your photos or comment below so we can share with the class!