It was a positively friiiiightening week! (...in more ways than one, if you ask Madame). ;-) We were thrilled to have our PME Halloween costume parade tradition back after a long hiatus due to COVID! It was so fun getting the chance to see everyone's costumes! We also loved having the opportunity to see our big buddies perform Halloween dances in the gym! There was even a super spoooooky Science lesson where we made hypotheses (a new word for most of us!) about which type of ice would produce the biggest reaction when placed inside a glass or a bowl full of juice... normal ice cubes, ice cubes made from Coke, or dry ice? Most of us thought that the Coke cubes would produce the biggest reaction because Coke is fizzy and we've heard so many tales of the explosive reactions of Mentos and Coke. But despite all the hype, the Coke cubes were about as dull as dishwater. BUT... the dry ice... now THAT was exciting...! Clearly, we were going to be tired after some late-night trick-or-treating, so we welcomed the opportunity to come dressed in our PJs the day after Halloween! And even better, Madame let us build forts and spend all day working, eating, and playing in them! It was also the school's official "Home Reading" kick-off on pajama day! Even though most of our class has already been doing home reading since September, we enjoyed the excitement and camaraderie of getting together with all of the other French primary classes and listening to our principal, Mme Simon, and our librarian, Mme St-Amour, read us a story. Since we've had so many questions about spiders lately, we continued our inquiry into them this week! We watched a video clip about the differences between insects and spiders and why spiders are therefore NOT insects. We labelled the parts of a spider and then got to go on an actual spider hunt! We managed to catch some specimens to bring back to the classroom to examine. (No spiders were harmed in the making of this lesson. All spiders were promptly returned to the wild.) ;-) We noted some interesting observations... like that spiders seemed to be easy to find along the walls of the school, especially in corners. Why is that? There were several specimen to examine and we sorted through them to separate the insects from the spiders, identifying the reasons why some would be classified as insects and the others as spiders. Then we used our trusty friend Google to look up what kinds of spiders we have in BC. We compared the specimens in our jars to the pictures from Google and were able to get a vague idea of what we had in our jars. The most surprising for Madame was... a black widow? Seriously? Nooooo...! We don't have black widows here, do we?? Even Madame is learning things. The fact is that we DO have black widows here (surprise!), but Madame was quite certain this wasn't one of them, even if it did seem to be the best match with the photos that we had. She dug deeper at home and brought us some more photos the next day. We were able to identify the curious specimen as a brown-legged crab spider (scientific name: coriarachne brunneipes...we had fun trying to pronounce that one!). We all agreed that this appeared to be a much more likely match than the black widow. But it's not all about Google. We're bringing back traditional learning, too, with BOOK research! We enjoyed spending time looking through a number of books about spiders, putting sticky notes in pages that sparked questions for us, and then sharing what we found with the class. And continuing on the spider theme, our Friday team challenge was all about creating webs out of different materials and measuring their tensile strength. The tensile strength of a material is the maximum amount of stress it can stand before breaking. Our challenge: find out which spider web material would hold the greatest amount of rock "spiders". Whichever material held the most would have the greatest tensile strength. We tested 3 different materials: 1. yarn 2. uncooked spaghetti 3. decorative spider webs The idea was that we would work together to create webs using these materials, being careful to reproduce the same web patterns with each of our 3 materials to ensure a scientifically accurate test. And when Madame looks back on that idea, she laughs and laughs at her fool-hearted naivety to think that it would actually work. It turns out that just weaving the yarn around the loom was challenge enough. ...Forget keeping track of our actual pattern in order to reproduce it delicately with single spaghetti strands. Bahaha! We dumped spaghetti in clumps on the looms instead. So... our tests were not scientifically sound, but we had fun doing them. And were able to discuss later why our results may have been skewed. ;-) Team points for everyone for such a great effort and for really pitching in to help with clean up! Extra photos
Comments are closed.
|
Archives
June 2024
Categories |