Joyeux Noël! The much-anticipated final day of school before Winter Break has arrived and we are all just *slightly* excited. We had a blast at our concerts and were very proud of all of our hard work! A big "merci" to all of the friends that gave us special Christmas gifts! We were very spoiled! And our Big Buddies even baked us Christmas cookies on Wednesday and dropped off pancakes and sausages for us this morning as a surprise! The rest of this week was definitely not a "write-off" for us. Our big event was our field trip to the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre on Tuesday where we learned so many things! We talked about the sun - how it's a star made up of a ball of gases, and how our Earth and the other planets rotate around it. We learned about why the spinning of the earth causes light during the day and darkness during the night, about how the tilt of the Earth causes seasonal changes and what those changes mean for First Nations groups, particularly in the way that they fish and the types of salmon that they catch. Madame may have shed a small tear of pride when one student raised her hand and explained to our presenter that we had already learned about salmon and that when First Nations people eat salmon, they bring the bones back to the river to say hay čxʷ q̓ə ("thank you") for the fish. The presenter had never heard that word and he learned something new that day! (Ooooh, this makes Madame so happy!) ;-) We also learned about nocturnal vs. diurnal animals, and got to lay back in cool chairs to watch a movie on the giant ceiling screen of the Planetarium to hear all about constellations, planets, and how our Earth fits in to all of that big space beyond! But what was our favourite part of the trip? If you asked many of us, our answer would be "running around pretending that the aliens in the waiting area ['cosmic courtyard'] were going to get us!" Or "riding in the car!" It's the little things... Photo credits for some of the above: Heather Rhodes and Maria Perretta Science also did a mash-up with Christmas this week in our classroom. We did an experiment using candy canes and tried to predict which one would dissolve the fastest - the candy cane in hot water, the one in cold water, the one in vinegar, or the one in oil. We drew out our hypotheses, many of which were more interesting than Madame would have predicted: "I think that the candy cane in cold water is going to turn blue because cold things make ice and ice makes things blue." ...not exactly on the mark, but Madame loves the outside-of-the-box thinking! In the end, we found that the candy cane in hot water dissolved the fastest and we were all surprised to see how it not only made the candy cane thinner, it also removed the colour. Madame used oreo-flavoured candy canes so we loved how the hot water jar ended up smelling like hot chocolate! Some other highlights from the week: playing with our Big Buddies and learning how to do cup stacking with Mr. Severud. We also got really creative with some of our Christmas crafting this week and had a lot of fun doing a sing-along in the gym with a whole bunch of classes on Friday afternoon. Merry Christmas et Bonne Année!
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