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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