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!

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

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

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!

Bad bugs

My husband has a bit of s green thumb and an obsession with hot peppers.   He ordered some of the hottest seeds in the world including the ghost pepper and carolina reaper.  He grew them from seed starting in January and they did well in our garden all summer.  Unfortunately our growing season is too short and so before the peppers could grow we had to take them inside. 

I have a beautiful class garden and have added two of our hot peppers to it to see if they will produce anything indoors.  Another problem we have is that bringing in an outdoor plant has brought in the bugs!!  Eeewwhh! 

We have learnt all about pesticides, bioaccumulation, and organic food and although it would be easier to just buy some kind of chemical to take care of the little "buggers" we don't want to put toxins on our food. 

So we quarantined the plant from the rest of the garden and used an old trick my mom taught me.  We sprayed the plant and the surrounding soil down with soapy water.  It seems to be working and hopefully with a few more applications we will be bug free.

I love when what I teach just happenes to pop up in real life!

Class garden

Our class garden and Earth Boxes are growing really well and brings so much life into our room!  I love it!  We also planted some pots with food scraps to show asexual reproduction and some of them have also grown really well.  Yum!  Finally our CD case garden labs are doing great and the kids have chosen their own variables to see how they change growth (light, water, nutrients, etc).  Results TBA!

See more about planting out Earthboxes here

See more about the Earthbox project here

Engrais

Les engrais et les plantes

VIDEOS


Organic Vs Inorganic fertilizershttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4ARWNth2ZM

Organic Food
http://www.brainpop.com/health/nutrition/organicfood/preview.weml

Flower Power

We had a lot of fun last week building flowers!  The kids had to bring in supplies and in two periods build a flower and label all of the parts.  It is always a great way to learn and brightens up our classroom!

Tree Lab

Today we learnt about how to identify trees.  Have a walk together this thanksgiving weekend and let your kids show you what great Alberta arborists they have become!

See more details from last year's lab. http://mmemerriman.blogspot.ca/2012/11/tree-lab.html

Spruce and  stunning yellow Tamarack (Mme's Favorite!)

The beautiful red maple tree in front of the school

Class Garden Progress

Our Earth boxes are in full bloom!!

Day 1 - September 27

Beans - 1 week

1 Week - lettuce, spinach and swiss chard

10 Days and going strong!

We will be planting parts of all of these plants to see what we can get using asexual reproduction!

Flower power

This week we learnt about various plant structures from root to stem, leaves, and flowers!  We learnt about diffusion and osmosis and how water enters the roots of plants.  This demonstration shows how water (and food colouring) travels up the stem and out to the leaves and flowers.  Also the water leaves via transpiration but the colour stays in the pedals.  Beautiful.

 A great explanation here