We were lucky today to have Mr. DeRee come and help us shoot off bottle rockets using water and air pressure!
WOW! What a turn out! Thank you so so much for those who were able to join us today for this celebration. We also had many classes stop by and several staff members. Your kids received lots of compliments today on the AMAZING work they have completed!
Today we built and launched rockets! Students had to construct a rocket out of a rectangle and circle piece of paper. The divided the circle into fourths, cut out a forth and made a nosecone to be the tip of the rocket. Then they wrapped the rectangle piece of paper around an old film canister and added wings to the bottom. The taped the nosecone and cylinder together to create the rocket. To get them to launch we filed the canister halfway with water and then dropped an Alka-Seltzer tablet in and quickly snapped on the cap. Students then measured how many inches did their rocket travel.
To check out an insane version of this experiment that was featured on Ellen head to this video and fast forward to about the 2 minute mark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsayFUSwKfs Today we read a book titled Chicks and Salsa to go along with our chicken theme! Kids did a craftivity that tied in with the text. Then we did some data collection on our class by taste testing different kids of salsa with tortilla chips. Below are the results! And FYI - The chickens should hatch on May 27th!
We investigated different areas of our playground to see which force - push or pull - we needed to use to get in motion!
The kids are able to identify and match halves and fourths now so to deepen our understanding we have worked on representing and explaining halves and fourths. The kids pretended to call one another and order pizzas and then drawing representations of the pizza that was being ordered. They had to label the parts of the pizza with what fraction of the pizza was covered with what toppings were ordered. Then they got to construct a pizza of their own choosing and explain their fractions through word form (whole, halves and fourths) and number form (1, 1/2, 1/4).
We compared different forms of fractions to see what they had in common to help us develop the understanding of dividing groups of items or one item into equal parts. The kids then created play food out of play dough and divided them into fractions. We got into a conversation about how the top number of a fraction talks about the part and the bottom number means the total equal parts.
Our eggs are now 9 days old! We candled them again today to check their progress. Candling is the process of shining a very, very bright light on the egg in a dark room to see if there is growth inside. You can tell if there is growth inside by tracking the amount of dark space vs. light space inside the egg. As the embryo matures you can even see blood vessels and movement inside the egg! We have good growth in 10 of the 12 eggs we are incubating. In the picture above you can see one of the eggs we are candling. The light space at the bottom is the air sac that the chick will use to breath the last few days while inside the egg and the dark space at the top is the embryo. This week we also cracked open unfertilized eggs (the kind in the grocery store that will NEVER become chickens) to study the parts inside a shell. The kids learned the yolk is the food for the embryo if the egg was fertilized and the clear stuff around it is the albumen which provides water and a safety cushion inside the shell.
So far here is what has started to develop: brain heart beak - was soft and now is starting to harden egg tooth - baby chick uses to break out of the shell and then it falls off when it is a couple days old wings legs blood vessels and.....the feather started to grow today! |
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May 2015
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