It was First Peoples In Residence week – a week that involves the sharing of Indigenous knowledge and traditions. In our week’s opening ceremony, we watched Pow-Wow dancer Shyama-Priya perform the jingle dance and a few of our students and teachers volunteered to learn! She shared the significance of the jingle dress itself, regalia that includes layers of metal cones that are stitched to the dress and make a jingling sound as the dancer moves. We had lots of fun learning the steps of the jingle dance as a class.
Our last week before spring break… and a busy one it was!! It was First Peoples In Residence week – a week that involves the sharing of Indigenous knowledge and traditions. In our week’s opening ceremony, we watched Pow-Wow dancer Shyama-Priya perform the jingle dance and a few of our students and teachers volunteered to learn! She shared the significance of the jingle dress itself, regalia that includes layers of metal cones that are stitched to the dress and make a jingling sound as the dancer moves. We had lots of fun learning the steps of the jingle dance as a class. Another highlight of our week were the music and stories shared by Chandra, one of the cultural facilitators. She told stories, sang songs and taught us how to drum. We loved that! She also taught us about the importance of the symbols and colours while we made traditional button blankets. A big thank you to our cultural facilitators for an amazing week of learning. Huy ch q’a. We put finishing touches on our Rube Goldberg machines and recorded observations and the changes that we made along the way. Lots of great learning. We then captured our machines in action! This week also included Jump Rope for Heart!! We had great fun being active and supporting the Heart and Stroke Foundation. Happy Spring Break! Wishing everyone a wonderfully relaxing and rejuvenating time away from school. See you on April 1…no joke!! 😉
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We have been learning about…and fascinated by… simple machines. To share our learning, we will be creating Rube Goldberg machines that include three simple machines. We’ve designed blueprints, have begun construction and will be recording revisions made along the way. It’s been a great opportunity to use our Creative & Critical thinking! We enjoy hands-on learning so we are loving the activity. What is data? How do we collect data? Two questions we didn’t know the answer to until this week. It turns out data is everywhere! In fact, we’ve been collecting data while recording observations during our recent Science experiments and tallying students on Walk to School Wednesday. We just didn’t realize that that was data collection! To explore further, Ms. T led us through an activity that involved measuring and recording our pulse during different types of physical activities (sitting, walking, jumping). We then compared our data and noticed that our heart rate changed with different kinds of exercise. Ms. T also led a Slow Reveal Graph activity. She showed us a graph and asked, “what do you notice?” and “what do you wonder?” We had some great ideas that we shared.
More parts of the graph were gradually revealed… and we discussed the new information and how our thinking had changed. We asked lots of great questions as we tried to make sense of the data on the graphs. (To learn more see Brian’s post) Our next activity involved similar questions – what do you notice? and what do you wonder? – as we examined a scatter plot graph. We noticed that the horizontal and vertical parts of the graph (the axes) were labelled and that there was a title. We used that information when creating our own scatter plot graphs. We’ve loved learning about data collection and are looking forward to learning more in the next few weeks!
It's hard to believe that it’s already March and spring is on its way! Time flies! This week we were scientists in action as we continued with a few different simple machine experiments. We’ve gotten really good at justifying our predictions, making observations and collecting data – we’re almost ready to begin our own inquiry! Our experiments this week involved working with screws and a simple pulley. The first one had us compare removing a screw and a nail from a piece of wood and determining which was harder. Although we expected the screw to be easier to pull out, in fact, the opposite was true. It proved that screws do an excellent job of holding things in place. Our second experiment had us making different pulleys out of a jug, rope and a wooden stick and comparing what we observed. We quickly noticed that the more pulleys you use, the easier it is to lift. It’s been loads of fun exploring simple machines while learning about the scientific method. February 27 was Pink Shirt Day, a day to raise awareness against bullying. Our Student Teacher, Miss T., read us We’re All Wonders and led a great discussion about being different and how it feels to be teased. In the story, Auggie feels sad when people talk about him behind his back and say mean things. To feel better he puts on his helmet and imagines travelling to another planet. We made connections to Auggie feeling different and shared what makes us feel better when we’re sad. Even though we’re all different in some way, we need to always treat others with kindness. Pink Shirt Day is a perfect reminder of that. In writing, after getting clear and helpful feedback from our peers, we needed to know how to use that feedback to make changes or additions to our stories. Our teachers again modelled how to do that. They showed us the original writing sample from last week and modelled how to take suggestions for improvement and make revisions. From the activity we did last week, we knew that the problem needed to be clearer, so our teachers showed us how to add details throughout the story that referred to the problem. They also showed us how to give our characters more personality and to include details about the setting. Along the way, we shared helpful ideas that our teachers used to improve the story. Watching our teachers use feedback to make changes gave us a clear understanding of how to do the same. When it was time for us to get started, most of used post-it notes when making revisions or adding details. We’re one step closer to our final draft. Can’t wait! Another awesome week of learning in divisions 6 & 7. Only two weeks left before spring break!!
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AuthorWe are a curious group of kids who are excited to share our learning with you! Archives
March 2020
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