Normally, I alternate between Social Studies and Science, but I've had to get a little creative with our scheduling to accomplish what I am hoping. That being said, I've started to loop in some Social Studies lessons while we've been wrapping up Science. We began by discussing identity. What is identity? What is the Canadian identity? You might enjoy watching this spoken poem by Shane Koyczan called We are More from the Vancouver Olympic opening ceremonies. **NOTE: watch only at the 2h15 mark or else you're going to end up watching 2+ hours of video!! We discussed our own identity, chose photos that represented who we were. We are learning about a person's identity vs. a country's identity and how they can be very much intertwined. We're now looking into who came to Canada in the past - beginning with our own stories. Shoutout to the parents who wrote in to share their stories! It was so interesting reading where you and your families have come from. We looked at your stories in terms of push and pull factors that affect human migration. When you're chatting with your kids at home, please share your family's stories and relate them to reasons that attracted them to come to Canada OR reasons why they may have left their home community or country. As we move along through our unit we're learning more about Indigenous communities who have been in Canada for many years, as well as European colonizers that arrived here. We're looking at their relationship, conflict, cooperation, what they learned from each other, what they struggled with, and how that affects where we are today.
We've been busy this week beginning our final unit inquiry on Electricity. Before we can inquire about anything, we needed to figure out what makes a GOOD inquiry question. Students read different sections of an article in partners, and narrowed down the main points from those sections. Then, we mixed partnerships into larger groups to share what each partnership learned from the smaller section that they read. Below, you can see a few of the ideas students jotted down on the whiteboards. Important qualities of an inquiry question include:
Below, I began my own model inquiry, on the 1971 construction of the hydroelectric dam on the James Bay in Quebec. This was a huge project for the government of Quebec, set to allow them to harness the power of the water to create electricity, but also had a disastrous impact on the environment and the Cree who lived in the region. My question is: What could the government do differently if they were to construct this dam today? We learned how my question needs a lot of background in order for me to answer it. I need to know the basic facts of the project (think: who, what, where, when, why), I need to know the original impact, the perspectives of different groups, and more. Only then might I be able to look into current day policies and technologies surrounding the construction of a project like this to be able to suggest what the government could have done better. Students helped (on the sticky notes below) write these smaller questions that could be asked to support my larger inquiry, as practice. Now, students have created their own inquiry questions on the theme of electricity, energy conservation, and the environment.
I invite you to check out your child's inquiry question by clicking HERE and chatting with them about it. The questions are really neat, and cover a wide range of topics! Below you can see two groups beginning the preliminary stages of creating their larger question with mini-questions to go with it. On THIS post you learned about the first four Science centres... here are the next four. What can you do with these at home? Talk about them! Here are some prompts for when you're discussing with your child:
CENTRE 5: Students play Save the World online and then play Energy Dominoes together in class. Save the World challenges students to learn about different and alternative power sources and how we generate electricity for our daily activities. Energy Dominoes gives students a chance to review sources, forms, and examples of energy. CENTRE 6: Students get to explore a whole bunch of different toys - bouncy balls, Slinkys, pull-back cars, etc. Students discover what types of energy are used to make each move. What type of energy is lost in the system?
CENTRE 7: Students create a marble run and discover transformations of energy. CENTRE 8: Students explore the school with a wattmetre. They choose different appliances (fridges, water fountains, techtubs) and plug them into the wattmetre to discover how much power they are using in standby and active modes. The group below is checking out how much power the Chromebook is taking when it's not being used, as well as when they are watching a YouTube video, listening to music, or typing a document. They will share this information with other kids in the school to inform them on ways to conserve energy at KHPS! Have you heard about our Science centres? Each centre allows students an opportunity to investigate or discover something specific about Energy and Resource Conservation with their group. Here's a rundown of what they're learning in each - feel free to review or explore more at home! Snapshot:
The next four centres are coming up during our second rotation of centres, set to begin soon! Here's a preview:
Have you heard about our Science centres? Each centre allows students an opportunity to investigate or discover something specific about Electricity with their group. Here's a rundown of what they're learning in each - feel free to review or explore more at home! Snapshot:
CENTRE 6: Conductor or insulator? Students test different materials in the middle of their circuits to see what materials are conductors or insulators.... things like coins, foil, plastic, wood, and other classroom objects are all tested to explore the connection between materials that allow the electrons to flow.
CENTRE 8: Students use Ozobots as an electron to create an Ozo-circuit!
Grade 5s have been exploring all about energy and resource conservation in our community. After learning a bit about energy and testing a bunch of toys that make use of different forms of energy, students explored the school to see what forms of energy exist in our four walls. Students were then challenged to take a look at the resources (physical, electricity, water) and energy that they use throughout a day. They collected their waste throughout the day, and we checked it out to see what ways we could decrease our waste. We noticed that we used lots of water (like leaving the tap on when brushing teeth), lights (leaving screens and lights on when we're not in the room), and lots of packaging in our lunches. We discussed ways we could conserve in these areas. We've been checking out NU Grocery (two locations in Ottawa), a zero-waste grocery store. We even got to take a virtual field trip to the Westboro location, which you can do if you click HERE. They work to eliminate non-recyclable packaging from products and offer ways to buy in bulk so as to lower the amount of waste we produce when buying our groceries. What's up next? We're going into two weeks of hands on learning centres before we begin making our Rube Goldberg inspired energy transformation projects!
If you have any recyclables at home... we'd loooove to have them at school! Things like cardboard (thicker boxes and thin, like cereal boxes), paper tubes, yogurt and applesauce containers, bottles, etc. are going to be very helpful for our creations! Watt... what.... get it? I know... bad pun! Anyways, here's what the GRADE 6s are learning in Science about Electricity! If you're a GRADE 5 parent, then click HERE for your post. We've spent our week checking out series and parallel circuits. Students will have a mini-quiz next week, so you can review the concepts below with your child to study at home, if you'd like!
In the beginning students were simply challenged to light the light bulb using the materials they had in their building kits (alligator clips, mini-bulbs, switches, batteries, etc.). From there, they took off testing theories:
Students also learned to troubleshoot if things went wrong. They would test things like switching out batteries, checking bulb and wire connections, replacing bulbs, or stripping a circuit back to basics and then adding other components back in to figure out where they went wrong. They also worked through a series of circuit building challenges in teams (ex: create a parallel circuit with two batteries and three lightbulbs, where one switch can shut off two of the bulbs). Students learned to draw circuits with standardized symbols so that they could communicate about their creations with others. Students are currently working on an individual challenge to create circuits according to a specific description. You can see a screenshot below of what students are working on. Here is an example of a completed circuit by a student. Studying at home?
Let's kick of this new year 2020 with a BURST of energy! Woooohooo!
To start us off, in Science, we'll be studying Energy Conservation (Grade 5) and Electricity (Grade 6). So much fun experimenting to come in these units! If you're wondering about our (totally tentative and completely flexible) timeline for Science and Social Studies, click here. This is permanently linked on the RIGHT of this page under my name. ---> Here's the plan (generally, our Science units will work like this):
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Mme SamuelWondering what's to come in Science and Social Studies? Check out our timeline here for the rest of the year. Archives
March 2020
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