Last week we finished our science olympics flag! We put gears on our flag because gears are a type of simple machine and we are learning about simple machines. Our flag says 304 to represent our class. We made our gears by sandwiching two cardboard circles together and adding popsicle sticks for teeth. When the teeth of one gear touch the other gear it helps the other gear move which causes the gear beside it to move. This is what’s happening on our flag! This week we also learned what the difference is between revision (arms) and editing (cups) Revision is adding words and sentences, removing words and sentences, moving words and sentences and substituting words and sentences. Editing is adding capitals, fixing punctuation, fixing spelling and usage. We have picked a piece of writing we have worked on the past year and are revising it to make it better so we can share it with the parents and the whole school.
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This week we started creating our lego mindstorms robots. We worked in groups to create our very own robots. We learned what a robot is and parts of a robot. If you don’t know what a robot is, here’s a quick summary: A robot is a machine with human like features. It can help you do work like fix a pipe.There are many types of robots! For example house cleaning robots, drones,and androids. An android is a robot that mimics the form of humans and can do human jobs.We have a question for you. Do you think a toaster is a robot?
We have started our work on our cardboard fort with our grade eight buddies! Right now we are making our mini models. Our goal is to add as many simple machines as we can to our fort. We have to include pulleys, levers, gears, wheels and axles, and screws. Speaking of simple machines, we have been learning about levers. Did you know that 2nd class levers have their fulcrum at one of the ends and that 1st class levers have their fulcrums between the load and the effort? Speaking of robots, we are excited to find out what happens in our class novel, The Wild Robot. The main character is Roz, a creative and friendly robot who helped a lot of her animal friends. She even adopted an orphaned gosling! We are near the end of the book, and it looks like Roz might get captured and taken from her island home. Besides all the design work and excitement of reading The Wild Robot, we have been working hard in math, learning math facts and practicing word problems that involve rates and ratios. We have also been learning how to revise our writing and we have begun learning cursive, a type of writing where you can connect the letters to write faster. On Monday, January 22, we went to Heritage Park to learn about Canada's history. We learned about the railroad built across Canada. John A. Macdonald wanted to connect the west side of Canada and the east side of Canada. He found a piece of land that the the U.S wanted but so did he. He told the people of the west to come to the land (which was called Rupert's Land) because there were free farms. He also told the people in Europe. He never mentioned the negatives, like the cold weather. A very rich and important person put in the last spike (a spike is a type of nail). When the last spike was put in, a kid photobombed the picture! His name was Edward.He was very bored at his father's farm and he heard about the war in China. He decided to go there on his horse. When he reached Revelstoke, he found out the war was over. Since he was by the railroad, he wanted to get a job. After a few years, when the photo was being taken, he crawled under all the businessmen, popped up and photobombed the whole thing! We had Kid Inventor Day (K.I.D) last Wednesday. We made our own Olympic sport, which was ski jump and bobsled combined. Our vehicles had to jump off a ramp like a ski jump and land successfully. They also had to make a turn without flipping over(like a bobsled). Right now, we are planning to make some adjustments to our vehicles. Our first week back from the holidays has been a cold one! It has been too cold for recess, so we have been inside a lot! We have used some of our recess time building with K’Nex. We had tons of fun making K’nex machine models and learning about the simple machines we use in everyday life like egg beaters, elevators and bicycles. Then Ms.Blair decided that we should all build seesaws out of K’nex materials to learn about 1st class levers, which was even more fun than making stuff with the instructions. We looked at Ethan’s and Roman’s creation and they helped everyone else build theirs.
Can you spot the possessive pronoun in that last sentence? We have been learning about possessive adjectives and possessive pronouns. Here is a sentence with a possessive adjective: Is this your seesaw? In this sentence, the word “your” is a possessive adjective. Here is a sentence with a possessive pronoun: The K’Nex creation is theirs. In this sentence, the possessive pronoun is the word “theirs”. Revision is an important step in writing. To practice revision, we started by writing sentences about our preference for breakfast or lunch. When we put all our sentences together, we realized we really needed to revise our writing if we wanted it to be clear. We used cut and paste in Google Docs to move sentences so that all the “breakfast sentences” were together and all the “lunch sentences” were together. Next week, we will organize the sentences in each section. We have been working on multiplication and different arrays to represent multiplication. We learned a new game that uses arrays but to do that we had to learn some multiplication. We have learned that you can use doubling to find multiplication facts you do not know. For example, you can double the product of two groups of four (8) to get the product of four groups of four (16). Similarly, you can double the product of four groups of four (16) to get the product of eight groups of four (32). In french we are learning colours. Did you know that, in French, the color orange is spelled the same as the fruit? Welcome to our first post of 2018! After a relaxing break, we are ready to dive back into some of the topics we explored earlier in the year, as well as topics that are new. One topic we studied earlier is plant growth and change. We collaborated with Dr. David Bird, from Mount Royal University, to study the affects of genetic modification on a plant called Arabidopsis. Our plant experiment did not go so well, since very few of the Arabidopsis seeds we planted ended up germinating. Maybe we will try again before the year is out. Another topic we have studied is light and shadows. Leading up to the Winter Solstice Celebration, we had a lot of fun exploring light and shadows using flashlights, ray boxes, mirrors, lenses and prisms. We used our knowledge of light and shadows to create a wonderful light show for the Winter Solstice Celebration to go with live music played by the band in the darkened gym. We projected lights onto the walls of the gym, spun illuminated objects, used an overhead projector to create art, presented choreographed movement with glow stick-adorned costumes and created a shadow show. We look forward to diving into wheels and levers in the days ahead!
These last few months, we have been immersed in thinking about energy. We have explored sources of energy, ways we use energy and how our energy use affects the environment.
Since February, our classroom has been participating in the Classroom Energy Diet Challenge (energydiet.ca). The Energy Diet Challenge is a way for classrooms to reduce their carbon footprint and use less energy through fun challenges. In our classroom, we have enjoyed challenges ranging from a debate on renewable and non-renewable energies to a calculation of our food miles. We have practiced energy saving activities such as reusing paper scraps left over from a Science Olympics challenge. We have learned about using power bars to reduce phantom power loss and writing letters to the editor to share our thoughts about energy issues in the news. We have even done an energy audit of our whole school! As part of the Classroom Energy Diet Challenge, we are asking people outside our class to support our efforts and commitment to being more energy aware by using this link to sign our classroom pledge form: http://energydiet.canadiangeographic.ca/2017/main/classroom/6322 By following the link provided and completing the pledge form, you are agreeing to reduce your carbon footprint and to support us in reducing ours. The more community members we can recruit in our effort, the closer we get to completing this challenge. We only need 150 signatures, so please help us spread the word. To help get you started on saving energy and shrinking your carbon footprint, we have come up with a list of things you can do:
Good luck and thank you for your support! Grade 4 Students Room 304 Langevin School P.S. To check out our progress in the Classroom Energy Diet Challenge, please visit our classroom page at this link: http://energydiet.canadiangeographic.ca/2017/main/classroom/6322 At the Glenbow Museum last week we learned about the Blackfoot people. We learned that the Blackfoot people used to make their beds out of grass and bison hide. We got to look at artefacts from the Blackfoot people and from other cultures. We used some of the artefacts to "build" a culture, including its government, communication and beliefs, as well as its land, climate and resources. We named our culture "The Landers". We pretended to be a group of Landers who had a mineral that a group called "The Builders" wanted to take from our land. We had to decide if we wanted to negotiate or make a treaty with them.
After visiting the Glenbow earlier this month, we worked on "building" cultures that would live off the land in different regions of Alberta. When we were talking about the cultures we designed, we got to know the animals with antlers that are common in each region. For example, in the boreal forest, the moose is very common and, in the Canadian shield, the caribou is common. As part of our learning about Winter Solstice beliefs and traditions, we discovered that in some northern cultures, there is a legend that a female caribou holds sunlight in her antlers. We adapted this idea to create art pieces for our Winter Solstice Celebration. Our art shows Alberta animals - moose, deer, elk and caribou - holding sunlight in their antlers. We used opaque and translucent materials so that we could see the light shining through the antlers, just like the sunlight that the "mother deer" carries in Scandinavian legends. We have had all kinds of "enlightening" experiences in the last few weeks. We have tried using, mirrors, ray boxes, light tubes and crazy glasses to see what happens to light. We have used prisms to create rainbows and turn the rainbows back into white light. This has shown us that white light is made of the colors of the rainbow. We also learned that different colors have different wavelengths and different reflectivity. We tested colored sheets of paper and other materials with our robot's color sensors to find out how refelctive they were. We have had lots of fun learning about robotics with our student teacher, Ms. Raeewal. We have been programming and re-designing our robots so they can be used to present a shadow story at out Winter Solstice celebration. Each robot will be moving with a spinning shadow puppet and a light shining behind it. We made a wheel and axle and put different pieces of cut-out paper at the end of each spoke and attached it to our robots. Then we attached a sensor that shines different colors of light at the paper cut-outs to make shadows. The shadows will move when the motor turns the wheel. According to Aiden, "It was exciting to figure out how to attach the motor so it could show the shadows on the wall." We tested and changed our programs many times so that our robots would move like we wanted them to. Our robotics work helped us with our math learning as well. During robotics, we had a challenge of making our robot go 30 centimeters. We had to think about how many turns of the wheel it would take to go that distance. We discovered that one wheel rotation wasn't enough but two rotations were too many. That led us to needing to understand decimals. When we understood tenths, we could program our robots' wheels to go 1.2 or 1.3 rotations. We are all looking forward to our Winter Solstice Celebration and to the fun and relaxation of winter break! Hi blog readers! This week we have had a lot of fun and interesting learning opportunities. On Monday we had a field study to Telus Spark. First, our class split up into small groups to explore the area. They even had a new exhibit where you could lie on a bed of nails, see how much water is in you, and even drink out of a toilet! In the second half of the day, our class made shadow puppet shows including one about a knight, one about space, one about a baby polar bear and one about a cube. We have been exploring with light, shadows and mirrors to complete some challenges. We have discovered that light bounces off of mirrors and goes where you didn't think it could go. Shadows are interesting because they are the opposite of light. In our exploration, we tried to see if you can detach shadows from your body. Some of us think you can and some of us think you can't. Have you ever tried finding news online? How about news written at a level that can be changed to suit your reading ability? Well, we have just discovered a website that is called Newsela and it is a great resource to practice reading comprehension and learning about current events. There are topics like geography, government and economics and wildlife. In government and economics, there are articles about the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis and other things related to that. We just finished making a "million cube". It is like a giant version of a one centimeter square cube and it represents one million of those "mini" cubes. We used our million cube to help picture the number 30 million. That is the number of bison that roamed the plains before the Europeans came. We used ribbon to show the edges of a rectangular prism that would be made if we had enough million cubes to represent 30 million. The prism would be one meter high, ten meters long and three meters wide. If each one centimeter cube represents a bison, we can imagine the difference between 30 million bison and the number left after the Europeans killed them - 1000. In less than 100 years, that is a BIG difference! Hello, blog readers! On Monday, we had our Fish Creek Park field study. Half the day we were inside studying the past and how people adapted to their environments. The rest of the day we were outside on a scavenger hunt for plants and cultural artifacts.
The Fish Creek Valley has been home to many different people with many different cultures. The first European to settle in Fish Creek Park was John Glenn, from Ireland. He was married to a woman named. Adelaide was Meti. John and Adelaide irrigated the land and built a cabin in the the Meti style. Before the Glenns settled there, the valley was home and bison hunting grounds for First Nations people for thousands of years. At Fish Creek Park, we learned a lot about bison. Did you know there are many uses for bison? For example, First Nations used bison bladders for water bottles and for saving food. The First Nations people used the natural shape of the land to hunt bison. They chased them down a steep hill into a pound. The First Nations used every part of the bison - they just took what they needed; but the Europeans killed bison wastefully and only used certain parts, leaving most of the animal to rot. Our class has been using Lego Mindstorm pieces to build catapults and wheel and axle systems, which are both simple machines. We are excited to find out more about pulleys and gear systems using Lego Mindstorms! We are excited that Ms. Raeewal, a student teacher from the University of Calgary, has become part of our learning community. She will be with us for the next five weeks.
As part of our ongoing study of shadows, we have been collecting data each month about the length and direction of shadows cast by a meter stick at different times of day. Through this work, we are observing that shadows are affected by the position of the sun relative to where we are. We are also learning about the meaning of cardinal direction (which is shown on a compass). We have had a number of really interesting conversations about important concepts such as compassion, diversity and rights. Through discussion, we have generated lists of things that make us diverse learners, including how we have different problem-solving strategies and different ways of seeing things. Answering the question, "What is compassion?", we created a list of things such as "It is to care about others and to really have feelings." Reflecting on rights in the learning community, we created a long and very thoughtful list that includes such things as "we have the right to have our voices heard and considered" and "we have the right to a safe learning environment." Many of the ideas brought up in these conversations were reflected in the poem we wrote and presented for the Remembrance Day assembly: "In order to have peace, we need to remember..." Reciting our poem as we lit tea lights felt quite meaningful to us. We also enjoyed the two songs we sang at the assembly: "Why do we have Remembrance Day?" and "I've got peace in my heart." There were two more student presentations this week. By the end of these two presentations, we realized there is much more we want to learn about the issues of woodland caribou habitat loss and the disappearance of songbirds. We hope to revisit these and other issues in the months ahead. Our mathematics learning has led us to some interesting discoveries about the relationships between adding and subtracting. Today, we played with numbers to see that, if a + b = c, then b + a = c and c - a = b and c - b = a. We tried different numbers for a and b and these equations always worked! We have been working on organizing our ideas into paragraphs and connecting ideas with phrases such as "In addition to...," and "In fact,...". We have all practiced using topic sentences and elaborating with examples to organize our writing about the wild rose plant. We have continued our exploration of the changing face of Alberta, including a look at what this place might have looked like during the last ice age. We have also continued our work creating plant and leaf collages. We look forward to our day at Fish Creek Park on Monday! |
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February 2018
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