We had an exciting first meeting with our "grands amis" (big buddies) this week for some special crafts! We were each paired with one or two buddies from Mme O'Neill's Grade 6/7 class. They have now started being our lunch monitors, as well, and we all just love hanging out with them! They will also begin doing daily buddy reading with the Grade 1s very soon. In Math, we continued to practice our French counting skills with the game of "What time is it, Mr. Wolf?" This not only gives us great counting practice, but also great French vocab opportunities! We also practiced some more patterning. We learned that one of the most important criteria for recognizing a pattern is that it repeats itself. We were gifted some class pumpkins from Aldor Acres last week so we put them to good use! We compared them with apples and hypothesized about which would be taller, wider, and heavier. Madame made sure that we all knew that some of the measurement work we were doing here was more like Grade 2 work so we shouldn't be frustrated if it felt difficult, but she likes giving us challenges and we can just do however much of it we're capable of completing. But our favourite part of this apple-pumpkin comparison investigation was hypothesizing and then testing which one would roll fastest down a hill! Most of us guessed that the apple would roll the fastest but, like good scientists, we needed to find out the answer for ourselves. And just for fun, we tried it down the slides, too. Because... why not?? We were delighted that our hypothesis was correct - the apple rolled the fastest time and time again. But, wait! That's not supposed to happen, Madame explained. Statistically, heavier objects SHOULD roll faster. The pumpkin should have won the race every time. So why didn't it? This was a great opportunity for us to discuss the fact that science doesn't always follow the rules because sometimes other things can get in the way. Some of our thoughts on why the pumpkin rolled slower: - it has a big, thick stem which made it not perfectly round - it could have gotten caught on things as it rolled - the person dropping the apple could have thrown it harder than the person dropping the pumpkin So even though our predictions didn't match conventional science, we still learned a lot! Sadly, or maybe not so sadly (depending on who you ask), our big pumpkin exploded during the hill testing phase. Happily, Madame was prepared with a plastic bag and we made sure to be good stewards of our environment and clean up our mess. This beautiful explosion then became the focus of our science investigation corner for the rest of the week. We used tweezers to pick out the seeds, examined them up close, counted them, etc. Extra pics...
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