Wednesday 22 October 2014

Field Trip to Fort Whyte

Today we had a great day at Fort Whyte.  In the morning, our session was on Weather.  We made a cloud in a bottle by pouring hot water into an empty pop bottle, lighting a match and putting it in, then closing the bottle up.  When we squeezed the bottle and then let go, it made a cloud - magic.  We found out that the raindrops needed dust particles to form (Liesl).  We got to use some real weather instruments and take some measurements ourselves.  Michael learned that our atmosphere is becoming filled with greenhouse gasses.  Our Ozone layer is becoming thinner, so more ultraviolet rays are getting in.  After we ate lunch everyone enjoyed the opportunity to touch the animals in the touch museum.  Then we had a session on People of the Prairies.  It was neat to see a house with grass growing out of the roof (Brady).  Tom really liked the coyote poop.  They knew it was coyote/predator because it had hair in it.  We went into a tipi and learned some things about the rituals of tipis such as entering clockwise and that tipi's face the East.  Sadly both groups had trouble counting the 13 poles that are used to construct a tipi.  The thirteen poles represented the thirteen full moons that occur over a year (Michael).  I think everyone's favourite part was the throwing of an atlatl.  Mr German threw it so far that they had to look really far for his spear! (Tom).  We saw a post that showed us just how tall a bison can grow (Matthew).  We learned that sometimes the Aboriginals used a corral to help them catch the bison (Tom).  There was such a lot to see there, we didn't get to see everything.  We had a great adventure.

Saturday 11 October 2014

Multiplication

As we move towards a more conventional method of multiplying; we move from drawing the array, to representing it more simply.


We remove the zeros to make multiplication simpler - don't for get to put them back on the answer!

 Then add up the products

  Ta da! We're done







Theme studies

In room 12 we use Universal Design for Learning for our Science and Social Studies.  Each term has 3 parts to it.  We have finished the first part for this term; my introduction of the topics and things that they need to proceed.  We did activities and watched videos about weather, properties of air, forecasting, history of people coming to North America, legends, the different groups of First Nations People that lived in what is now Canada.  We even migrated for a day.  A chance to experience the difficulties.  Now students are working in groups completing centres that connect to the 9 learning styles.  These centres allow the students to work with the material that was introduced in class.  At the end of each session, the groups present what they have learned.  In a couple of weeks, we will move on to individual projects, their chance to really show me what they know.

These students are building a model that represents the water cycle.  They then explain each part and how the water cycle works.

Friday 3 October 2014

Brand new school year!

The new school year is underway.  We have been working on multiplication facts and reading large numbers.  We are now moving on to multiplying larger numbers, but we are going to take this very slowly.  We already knew that our basic facts in multiplication make arrays.  This week we learned that arrays are also made by multiplying larger numbers. 
Stay tuned, new strategy next week, less work!