This week was PACKED with fun activities and great learning! I'm not even going to blabber at the beginning of my post because there is SO much to share as it is!
Science
This was a HUGE week for science! Looking back, its hard to believe that we fit this many activities into one week! The first cool activity that we did was the oreo moon phase activity. The kids had been asking me lots of questions about the moon and why it isn't a source of light, so I decided to take a day to focus on the moon's reflection and how it changes through the phases. Although it was a fun activity, I found the whole process to be a bit too messy for my liking, and since we have science in the morning, the kids were hopped on sugar for the rest of the day which wasn't good! Also, the kids got the phases in the right spot, but I don't think that they truly understood what way their moons were supposed to be facing. I think that if we had had a longer class, it would've been a better success. With that being said, I decided not to be too nit-picky about it because it wasn't technically part of the grade 4/5 curriculum and I know that they will get it covered again in grade 6! Either way, here are some of the pictures!
The next day we started looking at properties of light. We did an experiment to prove that light travels in straight lines. We punched identical holes through 2 index cards, then placed a third card behind it and traced where the hole would've been if we were to punch a hole through that card too. The drawn on "hole" on card 3 acted as a target so that we could see just how accurate we were being. When the kids shone a flashlight into the holes, most of the light went through to the third card. Then I gave them a wooden dowel to put through the holes so that they could see if the cards were actually perfectly straight. Kids experimented with moving the cards around to recognize that the cards had to be straight in order for the light to pass through.
After discovering how light travels in straight lines, we spent the next day discussing the Law of Reflection and how we can use our knowledge of straight lines to predict the path of light. We discussed how light is constantly bouncing off of objects. I did a small demonstration to show how a reflected beam has the same angle as the incident beam when light has a mirror (I traded it and measured the angles with a protractor). Then I shone a light beam at a crumpled up piece of tin foil so that we could observe how light does NOT reflect in one single beam, but rather it spreads out in a larger area and scatters off into many different directions.
After discussing the law of reflection, it was time to use our new knowledge for a purpose! I designed and set up a "laser golf course" throughout our school that students rotated around from hole-to-hole trying to master. One student would stand on the tee-off box (an arrow with the number and direction), while the other kid had to use a mirror to reflect the light towards the target! The kids had a BLAST getting to be silly and have fun as they ran around the school reflecting light in various ways. For kids that finished early, I also started pairing them up with other kids who were done so that they could retry the course, but this time they had to reflect the light off of 2 mirrors instead! It was a lot of fun, and the kids were excited to tell me about all of the tricks that they learned while playing the game! Below is a video that I created to showcase our pictures and videos!
After mastering straight light, I introduced the kids to refraction. I created 5 centers that the will rotate through to discover some various ways that light bends. The 5 centers are broken down below:
Station 1: video
At station 1 the kids confine themselves in the breakout room to watch this short but magical video, then they discuss the video using some prompts that I have provided
Station 2: Light-in-a-box
At this station, kids work we me as I demonstrate how light changes through some different pieces of glass. I set a scientific light with "beams" within a box so that I could mark where the original 5 beams hit on the end of the box when there isn't any interference from other objects. Then I place a series of other pieces of glass into the rays, and we see how the beams change as they pass through them. The students quickly sketch a diagram after each example.
Station 3: The Tube of Wonder
Each kid gets to shine a laser light into the glass tube. The tip of the tube lights up. They must draw how they think that the light travels through the whole tube keeping in mind that light travels in straight lines (bounces back and forth off the walls until it comes out the other end).
Station 4: Wacky Water
Students experiment with how light travels through water through 3 mini-experiments. The first test is that kids simply fill a cup with water and put a straw in it to see how it appears "broken", then they draw a picture. The next experiment the kids take note of which way an arrow on a piece of paper is pointing. When they pour the water, the arrow flips around the other way! For the third experiment, the empty glass is placed in front of a sheet of diagonal lines. Once water is poured, the lines switch which way their diagonal is!!
Station 5: "Olive laser beams!"
Students were to play around with a curved glass bottle filled with olive oil to see how a laser beam can bend when it hits the oil in certain ways. The beam also can internally reflect! I had decided to include this center because it is neat how you can actually SEE the beam of light when it passes through olive oil! This center was set up so that kids would try the laser at 3 different heights and then they could play around with it by themselves for a bit. Some kids were able to make the laser beam refract so that it was almost immediately beside the bottle, other were shooting the light into the left side of the "ball" up top, and it would curve around and come out the right side, etc.
Health
Due to laser golf, we only had one health period this week, so we used our time to start discussing online safety. We had basically opened up this topic by having a big class discussion about what we know so far, and about what rules we think that we should follow to stay safe. We had a good discussion, I was happy to hear that the kids already seem to have a lot of knowledge about online issues, and I think that this could be an interesting topic! I shared this cute video with the kids and they loved the song... I have a feeling that we will end up listening to it a few times!
Gym
This week we wrapped up our dance unit. I had Jamie Medicine Crane (the head of FNMI for our school district) come to visit my class to teach us about some aboriginal pow wow dances. The kids were great because they were so interested in hearing about the different dances. We even got to try some dances such as the owl, the snake, and the friendship dances!
We also ended off our last day by having a Zumba dance party in the gathering space!
Social
Social was long overdue for some literacy integration, so I had the kids create a Fakebook account for one of the 4 fur traders we had been looking at! Some of the kids really caught on to the concept and flew with it, while others really struggled to put themselves into the fur-traders shoes and imagine what they might've posted about their lives if they had had Facebook back in the day. I loved the idea of this project, but the site itself had many issues that we had to battle against. For example, the site only lets you 'save' your site after it has a few posts saved on it, which was a big problem for us because we were experimenting with the site! In the end, we got some pretty funny posts out of the project, and the kids now have another program that they can use in the future!
Math
After doing so many interactive things in last week's math, it was time to slow things down and work through some questions on worksheets to make sure that the concepts were lining up. One of the worksheets in our bundles was focused on a game that used a 100s chart, and how kids might start at different points, increase by different amounts each turn (in a number pattern), and we had to figure out who would win first. I decided to take this 100s game idea and roll with it - by having the kids play a variation of snakes and ladders! In this game, each kid draws a "fate card" to see what square they will be starting on. Then they each roll a 10-sided die which states how many squares each kid will skip-count by for their preceding turns. I had the students recording their processes as well so that they could monitor "I started at _____ and increased by ______". Each time that they hit a snake or a ladder (something that would've been altering the repetitiveness of their current pattern) they had to re-record what starting point they were at now, as well as restate how many they are still increasing by. I had decided to do the snakes and ladders version because I knew that then that would throw a kink into the predictability of who would win the game. The funny part, however, was that kids were still counting ahead before it was their turn and saying things like "Darn! In 3 turns I'm going to hit a snake!", which is great because they are engaged in the patterning without even realizing that they are doing more work! The glitch in this game, however, was if two kids happened to be hitting all of the same squares because they were working on the same pattern. I switched things up by saying that every time you hit a snake or a ladder, you still have to record your new "starting point" on the recording sheet, but now you could also re-roll the die to start a new number pattern! So, each time a kid hit a snake or ladder, they were essentially starting a new patterns and relations question! I think that it was a great success, and I plan on keeping this game as an activity for the remainder of this unit!
Other Fun Stuff!
We went to the Piyami Lodge to visit the old folks to sing, do puppet plays, and read stories. In drawing club we learned how to draw poodles, people, hippos, and bunnies, and in art the kids started making some really cool glue and watercolor Easter egg paintings!