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!
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February 2018
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