just a rainy day… and some reminders

A quick reminder to please make sure your child is dressed appropriately for the weather! October and November are very tricky in Ottawa, and we do go outside to play in light rain. The playground is also wet We might have sunshine and 30 degrees or rain and 10 degrees. We recommend a rain jacket, rain pants, and rain boots for outdoors, and dressing in layers because the temperature can vary. Thank you!

Upcoming:

NO SCHOOL on Monday, October 9th

SUPER TOP SECRET EXPERIMENT on Tuesday, October 10th. Guess what we are doing!

 

OCTOBER 17 GLOBAL MAKER DAY! Please send all kinds of recyclables, like all sizes and shapes of cardboard boxes and especially tubes/rolls (like from paper towels and toilet paper). Plastic containers (yogurt, sour cream, etc.) are also welcome but they must be cleaned and not smelly. (Trust me on that one!) We are also asking for corks, paint stir sticks, popsicle sticks, and other things like that. The class that brings the most items is added to the draw to win a prize and because we are the smallest (and most adorable) class in the school… let’s do this!!!

Success!

It worked! We were so excited to come into the classroom this morning and see the final results. We noticed that the purple wasn’t quite purple and upon further investigation, we found that the paper towel coming from the blue cup was not touching the bottom of the empty (purple) cup. We theorized that had it been touching the bottom, we would have gotten a better result. We also noticed that the water level lowered in the red, yellow, and blue cups and theorized that it must have travelled through the thirsty paper towels into the empty cups, and that is how the colours mixed. That also changed the colours of the paper towels, which is something we didn’t think would happen!

As we conducted our experiment, we followed the scientific method, below, which is posted in our classroom. Let us know if you repeat the experiment at home, and what results you got!

C is for…

COLOURS!

Today we started to explore colours, as our letter of the week is C. We reviewed the colours in Hebrew and we learned their names in English and French. We watched this video about mixing primary colours (until 3:02) and then made predictions on our chart to show what we think will happen in our “walking rainbow” experiment.

Let us know how it goes if you try it at home! We have to leave our experiment overnight tonight because it hadn’t quite finished by the end of the day. Check out the photos of our progress!

Stay tuned!

Fusion Power!

This morning we had the pleasure of a visit from Mr. Josh Ray in our classroom instead of going down to the maker space! We started investigating the states of matter and how to change them. Today’s topic was “melting” and we remembered that there used to be a TON of snow and ice on our playground and then it melted because hot temperatures are here! Our activity is creating a masterpiece using our many skills. To name a few: fine motor, 1 to 1 correspondence, matching, patterning, and… PERLER BEADS!!!

We’ve still got a lot of work to do on our creations before we fuse (melt) them together (with high temperature!) but here is a sneak peek:

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!

100th day is coming…

The 100th day of school is on Wednesday, March 1st!

As part of our 100th day celebration, we will be doing all kinds of STEAM challenges. One of those challenges is about sorting and grouping. Please discuss with your child what “100 of something” they would like to bring in (we talked about it this morning at our circle) and send in by Tuesday, February 28th. This should be 100 of one item – for example 100 paper clips, 100 buttons, 100 stickers, etc. The only rules are that your “100 of something” cannot be food and it should (preferably) fit inside your child’s backpack. Be creative! You can always reply to this post or send a message if you’re not sure, or if you have any questions.

Today we celebrated the birthday of the trees, and the birthday of one of our friends in class!

We kicked off the celebrations by planting the beans and lentils that we germinated last week. They will stay in our class all this week, to be taken home on Friday, so we can see and track their growth. We reviewed the life cycle of a plant (seed – root – sprout – plant) and talked about how trees are good for people, animals, and the environment.

Next, we had our favourite fruit show and tell, with kiwi, mango, pear, figs, grapes, pomegranate, cherries, and a pomelo! Everyone was excited to talk about their fruit and we used our five senses to examine them.

Then, we had a Tu Bi’shevat seder with our reading buddies in grade 4. We learned about the 7 minim (species), and enjoyed eating them! We made grass heads together, which were sent home today. They need a nice sunny spot and water every day. Please comment and/or send pics when the grass grows!

Then we celebrated our friend’s birthday and had some yummy cupcakes. A BIG thank you to his family for giving our class an awesome tug-of-war rope! We are SO excited to play with it!

All in all it was a very busy day. We hope they all sleep well tonight!

 

Tu Bi’shevat higiya! Tu Bi’shevat is coming!

JK has been very busy getting ready to celebrate Tu Bi’shevat on Monday! We talked about the importance of trees to people, animals, and the environment, and created some beautiful handprint tree art. We also started to germinate some beans and lentils, and learned about the life cycle of a seed: seed – sprout – root – plant. On Monday, we will join our grade 4 reading buddies and have a Tu Bi’shevat seder and a little surprise project!
Stay tuned!