Learning about Plants

Today Mavis came to visit us again. We learned a lot about the plants in our environment and how the First Nations people use them. 

After we had a word search and a special paper activity to do.  It was a good presentation.

Free Choice Tuesday

We try to start out Tuesday mornings with a bit of free choice. Sometimes we have access to the technology parts of our classroom and other times we don't. This morning was a technology free morning.  Take a look at what we got up to.

K-3 SAIL Band

For home learning this weekend we were required to create an instrument of our own. Today we brought them to school. We each played them on our own and explained how the sound was made with our instrument.  Then we played them together.  Have a listen.

Trout Hatchery

Yesterday we went on a field trip to a trout hatchery.  We travelled by school bus.

We even had two of our moms come along.

When we got there we learned a few things about trout and what they need to survive.  We also learned about what we can do to help them survive.

Then we went on a little tour of the trout museum.  We even saw them feeding some of the different trout.

Did you know trout can be all different sizes?

After exploring the trout museum our guide taught us how to map a river. We learned how to make a  legend with symbols to represent the different things we see in the river.

Then we headed outside to the river so that we could map the river.

We came back into the theatre for lunch. As we ate our lunch we watched a Magic School Bus movie about salmon and their migration.

Then we learned about the decomposition rates of different types of garbage. It made us really think about how important it is for us to compost and recycle or things before even considering putting it in the garbage.

Next we played a game about what's worse - what we put down our sinks, or what we put down the street drains.  We put all sorts of yucky things down the household drain like toothpaste, and shampoo and we put yucky things down the street drain too - car oil, washing soap etc.

We learned that what goes down the household drain isn't as bad as what goes down the street drain, but neither are good for the water that we and our fish need.

Our final activity was a little scavenger hunt around the museum.  We didn't have enough time to finish it but it was fun all the same.

Finally we headed back onto our school bus. Unfortunately there is a big accident on the hwy in the direction that we had to travel so instead of taking 40 min to get back to school, we took 110 min! It was a very long bus ride but we made the best of it.  Below is a picture of the accident scene we passed.

Have you ever been to a trout hatchery before?  What did you learn?

PS When we got back to school Ms. Lirenman sent an email inquiring about having the Salmon in the Classroom program happen right here at our school.  Who knows, maybe next year we'll be raising our own salmon.

Learning with Light

One of the  content areas of the new science grade one BC curriculm is learning about light.  Since we have a multi-aged class (students in grades 1, 2, and 3) we all explore this content area together. This past week we've been working through some challenges trying to understand light a little bit better. We are also using what we know to create with light.  Here are some photos of us working with "light".

Programming a Sphero to create colourful light art.

Working wiht light and mirrors to try to redirect light to hit a target.

An image created with light via programming a Sphero to move and change colours, and then capturing that with a slow shutter speed app.

Using shadows from light to create shadow puppets.

Creating more shadow puppets.

Watching Sphero create texture by capturing Sphero's movement with a slow speed shutter app.

While exploring light we've also done some experiments at home. Here are a couple you can check out.

Nafay
Jesse

Have you ever played with light?

Reading by Flashlight

We have been learning about light. Today we read in the dark by flashlight. If you noticed on some of the images you can see that light travels in straight lines. 

Learning about Guide Lines

Today one of our classmates taught us about guide lines. Guide lines are really helpful when you are drawing. They help you see where you should put things on the paper.  This lesson came at a perfect time as we are starting to illustrate our circle stories.

Young Guns Hockey

This week we have been fortunate to be a part of the Young Guns Hockey program. This program has been generously paid for by our parent group. Here are some photos of us in action. You will notice that many are blurry because we were moving all the time.