Going GREEN

MY WEBSITE HAVE MOVED!!  

PLEASE GO TO

THE GREEN CLASSROOM

https://sites.google.com/gshare.blackgold.ca/green/home

Exploring Trees

Sometimes you just have to go with it and get outside!  I was inspired by the beautiful morning and decided to change our lesson to go and explore the trees in our school yard.  Last week I had the kids learn a dichotomous tree identification key for a few tree samples I had collected.  I told them to bring them home to go and explore the woods and their neighborhoods this summer.  So I took my own advice and we had a beautiful morning outside.

Inside Education has some great resources on forestry and tree identification.  And I JUST found this video about forestry EN FRANCAIS!!

Grade 4 selfie!!

Touch the tree!  See the waxy side of the leaf and how it changes colour as it trembles in the wind?
Un tremble.  Oui!  Science!

And then a bit of Bill Nye The Science Guy always makes my day awesome!

Water Quality

Today we were able to bring a water sample from a local pond to class to study for our water quality lesson as part of our aquatics unit. Earlier this morning I tromped out to a local pond near our school and almost lost my rubber boots collecting a sample of water for the class.  (It totally would have been worth it! #SCIENCE).

We used the The Alberta Lake Management Society water quality testing kits for AWQA Day (Alberta Water Quality Awareness). They are these efficient kits used to test temperature, turbidity (clarity), dissolved oxygen and pH of water samples. Results are submitted across the province and compared over time to observe results.

Using our AWQA Day kits

The pond, recording results, and checking out some critters under the microscope

We studied our sample and compared them to tap water and our classroom aquarium water. The results were interesting and sparked very good conversations about the possible reasons why. It was a great teachable moment to notice that many of the results were not even close to what they had anticipated.  

Aquarium Water

Tap Water

Pond Water

We were also joined by a delegation of educators from China where Mr. Kierstead had visited earlier this year. We were able to show them what we had been studying today as well as the robotics projects a few of the kids had been working on during options. I am very proud of how well the students represented our school and our country.

Tomatosphere Results

The results from the Tomatosphere are in and have been submitted:

4-1 - A:87%  B:86%
4-2 - A:86%  B:74%
4F - A:97%  B:84%
7/8 - A:97%  B:84%
Average- A:91%  B:82%
CSA National Average  - A:76%  B:74%

This has been a great experiment and we have learnt a lot about plant germination and conditions for potentially growing plants in space.  

We received the following message from the Canadian Space Agency

Congratulations

You have completed the germination experiment of the Tomatosphere™ program. Please feel free to continue growing your tomatoes and measuring other variables. You may even send the plants home with the students for transplanting into their home gardens,if applicable. In past years students ate their tomatoes, made salsa with them or donated their "harvest" to those in need in the local community. We ask that you please compost or recycle materials where possible.

For your information, the seeds you received were all Heinz 9478 F1 seeds. They were grouped as follows:

• A - Control Group
• B - Treated in space-like conditions 

Check out R's harvest this summer/fall.  Yum!

 

Dissection des fleurs

Today we dissected flowers in order to learn their anatomy.  We looked at all of the parts of the freesia flower.
Aujourd'hui, nous avons disséqué fleurs afin d'apprendre leur anatomie. Nous avons examiné toutes les parties de la fleur de freesia.

Here are the links to learn more about flowers:
Voici les liens pour apprendre plus a propos les fleurs:

• Brainpop - flowers (English)
• Brainpop - les fleurs (Francais)
• Brainpop Jr - Plants

Online games and gizmos

• Virtual flower dissection and games
• The life cycle of plants
• Plant and flower activities
• Plant pollination gizmo (open in Firefox only)
• Detailed anatomy of a flower

  

 

 

Video - pollination

Indy in our classroom!

Quelle belle journee!  What a beautiful day!  Sometimes I love my job so much I think I may vibrate out of my skin.  Today was definitely one of those days.  We have been learning about simple machines and building devices that move and the kids worked so hard on their Angry Birds projects.  Today was like the cherry on top of the awesome cake.  Our class was lucky enough to have a very special guest speaker all the way from Indianapolis, USA.  

Thanks to Mr. Livingston from CanTorque (Edmonton) and the Tagliani Autosport team we were able to Skype a real Indy 500 race car LIVE into our classroom! FROM THE ACTUAL INDY 500!!

First he showed us a bit of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway (which we had looked up on Google Earth - WOW!  Yes, that is a golf course in the middle of the track.)

Then when the crew was ready we were able to see the driver, the talented (and Canadian!) Alex Tagliani, take off for a practice run.  VROOOOM!!!   It. Was. Awesome!!!!!!!!  The kids cheered!!

The noise was so intense our technology couldn't handle it and we lost audio.  We noticed flashes of colour dance across the screen and soon realized that it was the Indy cars zooming by so fast we could hardly see them.  Mr Livingston said they can reach speeds of up to 235MPH, about 400KM!  He added "They will pull 5-6 g's going through the corner. So a 150lb driver will fee like they weigh 900 lbs!"

He was gracious enough to answer some of the kids questions:
How long does it take to get around the track?  How long is the real race?
About 50 seconds and the track is 2.5 miles. Race will take about 3 hours. Very very hard on the body and lots of fluid loss.  The driver will lose 8-10 lbs during the race
How much does the car weigh?  Have you ever been able to drive an Indy car?
The car weighs about 1600 lbs. Sorry for the imperial but in the U.S. It's all we have!
No, you can't drive them. They are very rigorous with the engines, can't do anything without a representative from the factory. I have driven a formula Atlantic car which is a step below these. Great questions guys!
What do you like best about racing?  What's your favorite race car?
I love competition! It's also really fun to drive very fast without worrying about getting a speeding ticket.  
Fav race car, great question! I'd have to say our NASCAR Canadian Tire car that we run across Canada! I really love watching these Indy cars but prefer when they run on road and street courses. I like right and left hand turns

This is their NASCAR - SO COOL!!!

This weekend's Indy 500 big race on Sunday at 10:15am our time.  See a live stream of the track all weekend HERE.

Alex Tagliani also supports allergy awareness through his fantastic sponsors, EpiPen and one of their initiatives is the Summer of Tag or Ete de Tag.  It is a great contest I am going to promote in our school because it helps to acknowledge our Allergy Heroes.  See more details on the above links or click on the image below.

As part of my pre-teaching lesson for today we looked up Alex Tagliani as well as the science of Indy and found some great videos.  You're welcome.

Intro au plantes

Les Plantes

1.  Videos d'introduciton de Brainpop

2.  Jeux de vocabulaire de Tomatosphere

3.  Jeux et activites d'internet (Resources and Activities #1-29)

4.  Photos utiles

Angry Birds and Race Cars!

We have finally finished our grade 4 science Rovio Angry Birds project for the "building things that move" unit.  It was amazing to watch them problem solve as they battled physics and their own frustrations to get their cars moving.  Design after design, prototype after prototype they all kept going.  See HERE for a previous post about the science of motion and our research stage.  We learnt a lot about friction, potential and mechanical energy, and everything it takes to get an object to move on it's own.  I am pretty proud of my wee engineers.

Teachers if you want to do this project with your class in English or EN FRANCAIS just click on this link.  It includes the student workbook, teacher guide, and even paper 3D Angry Birds!

Come and see the bulletin board I made to show off our work!  (Not bad for a junior high teacher!)

What about seeing a real race car? There is a lot of science that we could learn from CanTorque.  We shall see...

  

Space Fun

Here are some ways to bring what we have been learning in science and taking it out of this world! #ImAllAboutThatSpace #CSAinspires

Click here to explore the NFB Space School

Games to play (Elementary kids)

1. CSA virtual colouring game
2. NASA Kids Club
3. NASA Space Play
4. NASA Climate Kids
5. NASA Solar System for Kids

Games to play (secondary kids)

1. Sky Science 101
2. NASA Space Place

Things to read

1. Star Acer Academy Cartoons
2. All about our Tomatoshpere project (games on the bottom)
3. Check out Twitter!
• #CSAinspires (How does the Canadian Space Angency inspire kids?)
• Canadian Space Agency @csa_asc
• NASA @NASA
• Chris Hadfield @Cmdr_Hadfield
• Jeremy Hansen @Astro_Jeremy

Videos to watch

1. Canadian Space Agency YouTube channel
2. NASA YouTube channel
3. The International Space Station Live from space
4. Earth live from the ISS streaming 24 hours

Mme's favorite space videos

This just gives me goose bumps...

BILL NYE SPACE!

Tomatosphere

What is Tomatosphere™ ?

Tomatosphere™ uses the excitement of space exploration to teach the scientific method. You will study the effects of the space environment on the growth of food that will one day support long-term human space travel.

Your class has two packages of seeds labeled “A” and “B”, and each contains about 33 seeds.

One package of seeds is a “control” (untreated) group and the other is the "treatment" group, which was subjected to a simulated space environment of -80°C in a vacuum just like space. The simulation is close to like what might happen to the seeds if there was a hole in the storage system on a spacecraft with astronauts going to Mars!  Will they still grow?!

We will be planting the seeds and waiting to see how many grow (germinate).  Will more grow from group A or from group B?

Why are we doing this?To have enough food for survival on Mars one day, astronauts will need to grow some of their own food. The tomato is one of the candidate crops for a “farm on Mars.”

Through photosynthesis, plants use light and the carbon dioxide exhaled by humans and give off oxygen to the air that is needed for survival. Plus we get to eat them.  Yum!

Click HERE to find out about how the seeds were treated and the story behind their space journey!

A few more links and games to explore:

• International Space Station
• Greenhouse for Mars
• Race to Mars games
• The Tomato Zone 

Click HERE to see our results!  It was very exciting!