April
3
March
20
Sprouting Seeds!
Sophia is our first classmate to share pictures of her growing wheat plants. She has recently sent us a picture of her sprouting seeds. Take a look!
What does your plant look like? What type of seed did you plant?
What do you notice? What do you wonder?
What have you been doing to help it grow?
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- Day 6
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- Day 7
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- Day 8
March
12
It’s a DIRTy Job
As we dig deeper into our soil unit, today we got our hands dirty and were able to apply some of things we’ve been learning. We were scientists exploring, analyzing, revealing, questioning, and having fun at the same time!
After some time, we then organized our earth sample into 4 categories. The students had to decide which categories those would be based on what they saw in their soil sample. For instance, big rocks, little rocks, living things, and so on. After, we did a gallery walk to see how other groups sorted their soil and we noticed many similarities!
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- sorting soil
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- gallery walk
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- big rocks, little rocks
Students discovered all sorts of interesting things in the soil. Some of these things included:
- worms
- centipedes (tiny ones)
- roots
- grass
- sand
- big and little rocks
- spider
Finally, we documented our observations, as scientists do, making sure to capture every detail. Great job, Gr.3/4 scientists!
December
10
Reporting Live From…
Our students have recently traveled as reporters to various habitats around the world! Some traveled to very humid destinations and some even traveled to the bitterly cold Arctic!
They researched, prepared, and presented to tell you a little bit about the Desert, Arctic, Rainforest, Forest, Mountain, Ocean, and Grassland habitats.
Check it out!
November
20
Habitat Posters
November
6
Habitat Destruction
Recently, our class has been discussing how habitats are affected by various things that can destroy the homes of the animals that live there.
We will be watching these videos in class and will talk about how one of of the ways humans are impacting animal habitats is through pollution.
What can YOU do to support animal habitats?
How can we help protect habitats?
October
8
Food Chain Fun
What’s a food chain? How does energy flow from one thing to the next?
A food chain shows us how each living thing gets its food.
A fun game we played together in class today showed us how a food chain works and gave us a chance to make our own food chains in small groups. Give it a try! Click here to try it for yourself. (Make sure Adobe Flash is up to date).
Here is some vocabulary we’ve been exploring:
- producers (make their own food, such as plants)
- consumers (cannot make their own food, such as animals)
- decomposers (break down food and eat dead plants and animals, such as bacteria, fungi, worms)
- herbivores (plant eaters)
- carnivores (meat eaters)
- omnivores (both plant and meat eaters)
What type of eater are you?
Here is a short video about food chains and food webs.
September
16
We Are Scientists
Today, we launched our first science unit called Habitats. We began with a nature walk in our school’s own backyard. We were paying close attention to the sounds we were hearing all around us. In addition, we were looking very closely at our surroundings, noticing the small things and big things, the colours, textures, and so on. We made sketches, wrote down observations, and asked questions.
Habitat: A habitat is a special place where a plant or animal lives.
Take a look at us in action!
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- We are scientists!
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- Teamwork helps
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- Two friends on a rock
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- Careful observation
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- Look what I found!
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- Do you see the bee and the pollen it’s carrying?
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- Very focused
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- Look at that!
June
20
Buzzing About Bees!
Turkey Jay, Mrs. Sullivan’s husband, is a bee-keeper ‘on the side’. He just loves bees and enjoys sharing his knowledge with others. There’s always so much to learn about bees. They truly are an incredible insect and are not to be feared.
He couldn’t visit with us today, so he sent me with some of his bee-keeping tools and gadgets to share with my students.
We watched some cool videos, learning a little bit about bees, including their waggle dance!
Students loved painting their designs on the bee boxes and Turkey Jay can’t wait to use these homes for the bees this summer! The bees will be happy and are thankful for beautifying their homes!
Here are 10 Fun Facts about Bees that
maybe you didn’t know:
1. There are 3 categories of honey bees: the males (drones), the females are the worker bees, and the queen
2. The only purpose of the male bees is to mate with the queen
3. In the Fall, the female bees kick out the drones from the hive because they are not needed over the winter time.
4. Drone bees do not have stinger
5. The queen bee has a bigger abdomen than the other bees
6. The queen lays 1500 eggs each day. It takes 21 days for the eggs to hatch.
7. When the queen lays an egg, she chooses to fertilize it or not. A non-fertilized egg turns into a drone (male bee). A fertilized egg turns into a worker bee (female).
8. The honey bee is the only insect in the world that makes food that we eat
9. Honey bees produce many things including propolys which is like a glue that bees use to seal cracks and secures things. If a mouse dies in the hive, the bees cannot drag it out, so they entomb the mouse in propolys so the dead body does not contaminate the hive. Smart!
10. Bees don’t sleep. Ever! They are not dormant in the winter. Their wings beat together and they produce heat this way.
June
17
Early Communities Dioramas
What an incredible job that the grade 3s did on their Social Studies Early Communities dioramas. I was so amazed by the level of detail in many of the projects. Wow! We enjoyed sharing our hard work with a few other primary classes as well, teaching them about our chosen community from early Canada.
Check it out!