SCIENCE FUN: February 6

Today we explored absorption.  We began using sponges and to absorb and transfer water from one cup into an empty cup.  Cameron called this "soaking" up the water with the sponge.  This gave the children some understanding about how water can be transferred  from one place to another.  It was now time for us try our "walking water" experiment.  How can we make water walk and why is this important?

When the two primary colours yellow and blue combine, it makes green, so we predicted that we will see green in the bottom cup.  

The paper towels absorb the water and the water travels down, combines, and forms a new colour in the bottom cup.

This process took almost 1 hour

Francine and Ryleigh were so excited to share what they learned about colour combining- they both drew pictures combining yellow and blue to make green.

The plot thickens ….over the long weekend, the green water travelled back UP the paper towels.  Cameron wanted to know why that happened.  He thought that the water walked downstairs, but that it couldn't walk back upstairs.  I told him that water and the paper towel have a very strong partnership and it's so strong that the water can travel up or down.  I drew a plant with roots, stem and flower to illustrate that this is how water travels from roots of the plant to the rest of the plant (it is worth noting that I did not use the phrase "capillary action").

MATH FUN: February 11

The theme for todays activity is the Olympics !  A few children remember seeing some skiing on tv and Sofia knew that I was an" Olympic really really fast runner."  She wondered if I retired because "it's too hard to run in the snow. " I reassured her that I retired simply because I could not run anymore and that this was a very long time ago.  But just how long?  We calculated this in 3 different ways 1) longhand subtraction 2) count by decades i.e. 1992 to 2002 is 10 years, 2002-2012 is 10 years & 2012 to 2014 is 2 years. 10 + 10 + 2= 22 years.

But how long is 22 years?

3)  I asked each child how old they were.  Francine and Mila said that they were 4.5 years old; Roy and Sofia said they are 4 years old.  Each child was given 4 red beans, in 4 groups and then we counted, 16 beans + 1 bean (Mila & Francine's half year combined) = 17 beans.  We repeated this task for the number 22 and discovered that we needed 5 groups of 4 with 2 beans left over.  The children could see the difference in the length of the chains.

The children making 4 groups of 4 beans to represent the sum of their ages in years compared to the number of years ago I competed in the Olympics.

Our next task was to have some fun with the Olympic rings and colour the intersections and then make their own Olympic rings !

Francine, Roy, Mila and Theo

Sofia

MATH FUN: February 4

 While reading Froggy Goes to School to a group of children during health break, we stumbled upon the name of the teacher Mrs. Witherspoon.  First we clapped the syllables and then we counted the letters - 11.  This was the inspiration for the Tuesday afternoon's math activity !

Theo was up first with 4 letters in his name, then Roy.  How many letters?  3!  How much more to make 4?  1 !  And away we went.  It turns out that Anamaria and Francine have the longest names in the school.  So with every name we determined how many more letters Francine has in her name than theirs.  In the end we did a quick graph to show how many children have 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 letters in their names.  This gave the children another way to visualize the statistics.

Letter writing with quills ...

Line of Inquiry: Change

Today we experienced what it was like to write with a pen made out of a feather called a quill.  

Mila enjoyed using the quill pen.

I spent time with each child to help them hold the quill and follow along the dotted lines of their names. Mila was th eonlly child that actually liked using the quill.  All of the other children wanted the felt pens:

It's too hard, I don't like this

I don't like this, felts are better and faster

This is taking way too long

It's too hard to hold

These are the differences that the children noticed between quill pens and pens of today:

plastic makes it easier to hold

feathers don't have handles to hold

feathers are supposed to keep birds warm not be pens

Needless to say, the children think that pens and felts of today are a great improvement over quill pens!

The children created their valentines post cards with stamping hearts, and using the quill pen.

Tomorrow (Wednesday) I will mail out the cards, but before doing so we needed to talk about that process using the letter above as an example.  Cameron recognized that this was a letter, he read the "middle words" and told us that the letter is for Creative Minds.  Together we figured out that the words on the top corner were from the sender, and the picture in the other corner is a sticker called a stamp.  The children also knew the stamp meant that the letter was "paid for to travel."  We are hoping that our valentines gets to their homes by February 14th !

How did they make paint in the olden days?

As the children continued with their baskets they wondered out loud about how people made paint in the in the olden days, glue, tape, and felt pens.  Today we are going to conduct a fun science experiment to explore the process of making dyes.  We used black berries, beets, and spinach.  People in the olden days used to paint with food colouring.  They used to make natural paints by crushing foods like beetroots or berries and mix it to make paints.  They would also find colouring materials from the earth (soil and mud) around them.  Most animals could supply bright red colouring material (blood).  they would paint with fingers or brushes of animal hair or a piece of wood they had carved.

The guessed that the blackberries would make black or purple dye; spinach would make green dye, beets would make purple dye.  We also experimented with green tea and curry powder.

The children enjoying the smell of curry powder

Watching the purple dye come from beet juice

Crushing tea leaves

Using homemade dye to decorate paper doilies.

Painting Baskets is a lot of Work!

At the close of this project the children finally get a chance to paint their baskets.  We used brown paint to represent the colour of wood.  Matthew suggested that we just "dip" the baskets in a big bucket of paint because using a brush takes too long.  Through this process the children wondered if there was paint, glue, tape and paint brushes in the olden days.  Plant dyes were used as paint in the olden days and this will be the next topic that we will explore.

Basket Weaving is a lot of Work!

Over, under, over, under…..as the children worked their way through their woven sheets, there was yet another common theme:  this is a lot of work!  I wondered out loud what children int he olden days would have done to make it fu and pass the time?  Mila suggested singing songs but today she was the long one singing as the weaving the newspaper reeds proved to be challenge hand eye coordination and their manual dexterity.  Both Mila and Cameron helped their peers with the weaving.

Basket weaving part 1 !

Part one of basket weaving - the basket skeleton looked more like spiders to the children and so they had a lot of fun playing before they began to weave.  The children needed to be very patient as each child waited for their turn to be shown what to do.  This lead to spontaneous play: Mila started singing and dancing her spider, Connors "spider" swallowed Kesler's spider; Paxtons spider walked across the room;  Ryleigh's spider danced; and Cameron decided that his basket was a robotic spider that could spin a web.

Making Homemade Butter is a lot of Work!

Line of Inquiry:  perspective

There are many similarities and difference between the way people live today and the way people lived long ago.  Today we explored how foods were prepared and preserved in the olden days.  We chose to make butter and compare it to store bought butter from Stongs Supermarket.  A common theme for the children was the shaking the jar was hard work and that their arms were very sore.  Before there was refrigeration, people used cool cellars or ice houses where ice could be stored 

(under sawdust often) .  But mostly food was preserved by smoking, salting or drying it.

The children enjoyed "the fruits of their labour" more than the store bought butter, however, they did not like the idea of having to make butter every week as opposed to having the convenience of buying butter from the store.  When asked what "convenience" meant I told them it means that it is easier to buy butter than it is to make it from scratch.  They all agreed.  It was at this point that Mila noticed the plastic Stongs grocery bag that the cream and crackers came in.  All of the children were familiar with these bags and we wondered what they used in the olden days if there were no plastic grocery bags.  In the olden days baskets were used to haul and store food and so Earth group will be weaving and painting their own baskets.

Toys and Games

Line of Inquiry: Perspective and Change

Through our readings, the children discovered in the olden days, children liked to play with dolls, marbles and build things with blocks.  They also thought that legos probably existed in the olden days since everyone has legos and they are made of plastic.  Last year in the water unit Cameron learned that plastic is not biodegradable so he pointed out that since legos are plastic they were probably around in the olden days.  With a little research we discovered that lego began manufacturing its bricks in 1949- not quite in the olden days.

We started with choosing toys from the drama area that may have existed in the olden days.  Plastic fruit, dishes, and dolls were the most popular choices.

We then visited the Bedford Museum of Education using the smart board to create a venn diagram of toys from the olden days and modern day toys.  It is worth noting even though the barbie doll and the old fashion doll, and the "transformer" action figure looked different, the children play with those toys in the same way- giving these toys a voice and personalities as they play.  So, perhaps play in the olden days isn't that much different from play in modern times?   

Then & Now: Ideas to explore

When were the olden days and what was life like back then as compared to now?  Thankfully, the children did not think that I was from the olden days but that maybe grandma and grandpa or their grandma and their grandpa were from the olden days.  After exploring pictures and books the children came up with a few ideas: 

Were pictures in the olden days black and white?     

How was food was made, stored, and gathered?

What toys and games did children play in the olden days?

How did children get their hair cut in the olden days?

 How did children go to school in the olden days? 

What did people use for money on the olden days?