We are a class from British Columbia, Canada. We are a class of 19 very curious and excited students that enjoy a wide range of activities (although gym always seems to come out on top!). We are interested in technology and how we can use it in the classroom to connect with our families and other people around the world.
Tomorrow is Beach Fun day at school! Bring your cool shades, your towel, some sunscreen and beach clothes for our fun day tomorrow. We’ll have lots of fun going from class to class doing fun summery things and, oh yeah, hoping that the weather does not bring thunderstorms our way. I will be wearing my coolest summertime clothes and maybe a rubber duckie to swim with!
If it is really cold and miserable, please remember to dress for the weather. If it is looking bad tomorrow, you can still wear play clothes but dress a little warmer. No swimsuits though and no bare shoulders please! See you tomorrow!
Weren’t the Grade 2/3’s wonderful at the concert tonight? They did a really amazing job with a tough couple of pieces. Well done, guys!!!! I am very proud of you!
Don’t forget to follow the link to practice your words on Spelling City! If you print out your completed test and bring it in to me, you can get an extra mark on your spelling test on Friday! As this will be our last spelling list for the year, let’s go out with a bang and rack up those extra points!!
Thursday was a busy day last week with the start of our second year doing the Tomatosphere tomato growing project. The students were all excited to get planting. As this is a multi-year project, our class was automatically signed up to do the tomato seed project again this year. As I told the students, this experiment is an actual live experiment with our results being combined with class across Canada in a test to see the viability in growing plants in a zero gravity environment. This year is very special as these seeds have actually been in space!
To start, we discussed why this experiment was important and why we might want to find the answer to this questions. We learned that the amount of food needed to go to Mars would be too great an amount to fit comfortably on the space shuttle packaged as it is now. However, if astronauts were able to grow their food on the way, it would not only save space, but also help provide clean air and water and give the astronauts something to do on the way.
We thenused the links (you can find them on the left hand side) to learn more about Mars and compare it to Earth. We also had fun learning how old each of the students would be if they lived on Mars as well as how much they would weigh! I have to say, after all my wife’s wonderful cooking, Mars is looking pretty good right now!
Next,we learned about the tomato seed and plant and ended the morning by planting our seeds! Students planted two types of seeds: regular seeds and space seeds. As this is a real life experiment, we needed regular seeds to compare. However, WE DON’T KNOW WHICH ARE WHICH!!!!! In order to make sure there was no favoritism, we are not told which seeds are which until the end of the experiment! I LOVE SUSPENSE!!!
As the days go by we will be making observations. The success point for these seeds is whether or not they grow two leaves. We hope they will grow more of course but we need at least two leaves from each plant in order for the plant to be considered successful. At the end, students will be able to take the plants home. Hopefully students will get to take both types home but we will see.
I found some video on plant seed growth and germination. The first one is from the book The Carrot Seed, which is a very old book and not having anything to do with tomatoes but just substitute carrots for tomatoes in your head.
The second video is a neat animation of the journey of a seed which is kind of neat and is theoretically one way a seed can move from place to place.
The next video is a neat time-lapse showing the growth and germination of radish seeds; again nothing to do with tomatoes other than the same growth a tomato seed would go through if we could see our seeds from the side.
Enjoy and check tomorrow to see if there has been any growth in our tomato seeds!
I just to tell everyone that I received a very nice email from the wonderful folks over at Edublogs praising us on the wonderful class blog we have. If you don’t know Edublogs.org is the site that I use to create and run our class blog. Today, I got a very nice email from one of the edublogs team:
Hello!
I just wanted to leave you a quick comment to let you know that your blog is featured as this weeks edublog-o-the-week! We love how dedicated you are to your students and your blog. We posted this today on our Twitter and Facebook pages, so you may see some increase in visitors over the coming days.
Congratulations and keep up the amazing work!
-The Edublogs Team 🙂
This is very exciting and may push us over 10,000 visitors if it does get more people to visit. That would be amazing! Anyway, just thought I would share the wonderful praise.
It has been a fast couple of weeks in Mr. H’s class. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t wonder incredulously where the time has gone. We have been having so much fun and there are so many events crowding the days in May that we may have to do May all over just so we can get everything in! Show of hands . . .?
Anyway, the students have been working very hard on all sorts of projects. In Social, students have been discussing and learning about jobs in the community. You can see a list of the jobs we brainstormed below:
Students are now working on reports on a type of job they are interested in. We used a couple of great kid friendly sites to learn more about specific careers and students are using the information to help them create their reports. We will also be doing Animotos of the jobs they have chosen to present to the class!
Science has been fascinating with lots of experiments happening as we continue with our unit on Properties of Matter. Students have been creating different kinds of solutions and testing to see what kinds of solids will dissolve in water. We have a couple of very interesting experiments happening. One of the experiments looks like it might take longer than I expected as the water does not seem to be evaporating as quickly as I would have like. As a demonstration, to created a solution of water and salt in a bowl, placed a sour cream container on top and wrapped the whole thing with saran-a-wrap. We had been talking about how important it was to take care of our water as part of Earth Day and how places like Saudi Arabia were having trouble with their water supply. It was a great topic because we had just had some visitors to our blog from Saudi Arabia that very morning. I told the students that Saudi Arabia was starting to look at changing salt water from the ocean to regular water for drinking and irrigation. That afternoon, when I did the demonstration, students were able to hypothesize that the salt water would evaporate into the container leaving the salt behind in the bowl. We then connected this to what Saudi Arabia might have to do to get more water! It was a great conversation! We are also creating crystals from sugar water. So two experiments on the go!
We will also be starting another long term project next week. Once again, our class has been sent seeds from the tomatosphere project which is run with the Canadian Space Agency. Classes are sent to packages of seeds; one package which are regular seeds and another package containing seeds that have been in space! We will be testing the seeds to see if being in space will make a difference to how the seeds grow. Problem is . . . we don’t know which are which! When the project is done and our results have been submitted, we will find out which seeds were the space seeds! Here is a video about the project:
Needed: In your child’s planners, students wrote down some very strange things. I asked the students to look around at home, with the help of their parents, to see if any of these items could be found at home and brought in to school to use for a Science experiment. I don’t expect families to purchase these things. I just want to check to see if there was any that could be lying around just waitin’ and askin’ to be used for the good of Science! If you have these items but expect to use them again, please don’t send them in as they may not come back in the best of shape! I am also wondering if anyone knows of a place in town that does helium balloons. Hmmmm!
For the next couple of weeks, we will not be having spelling tests as I would like to give students time to practice for the Spelling Bee. On May 17th, selected students will be participating in our school’s Spelling Bee. On the prior Friday, we will have our own Spelling Bee in the class to select students to go to the Spelling Bee. We will be selecting 4 students per grade to go. You should have seen a list of words and and letter in your child’s planner to explain the procedures. The words for the spelling bee will be selected from the words on the pages sent home.
Whew! That’s a lot of stuff! I should do this more often!!! 🙂
Finally, yesterday was a very special day especially for Jacob. It was May the 4th; the unofficial Star Wars holiday! (Get it? May the fourth?) Anyway, I found a funny video to help us celebrate even though we are a little late!
Once again, another busy week faces us as we begin the final hurtle towards the end of the year. We have a few events happening this week that I wanted to make you aware of. Today is class photos day. I am not sure when photos will be taken, but sometime during the morning, we will be going down to the church foyer to have our photos taken. As always, full dress is required.
On Wednesday of this week, students will be able to participate in Jeans Day which is the annual fundraiser for the Children’s Hospital. If students bring $5 in to the office on Wednesday, they will be given a button that will allow them to wear jeans for that day.
Here is the link to the Spelling City page. Remember! Bring in your completed spelling quiz or certificate and you can get an extra bonus mark on your spelling test on Friday!
Here is the bible memory verse for this week:
Jesus replied: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” Matthew 22:37
Tomorrow is Beach Fun day at school! Bring your cool shades, your towel, some sunscreen and beach clothes for our fun day tomorrow. We’ll have lots of fun going from class to class doing fun summery things and, oh yeah, hoping that the weather does not bring thunderstorms our way. I will be wearing my coolest summertime clothes and maybe a rubber duckie to swim with!
