All About Soil

We spent several weeks in April learning about "soil". We took soil samples from our meadow and sifted it to investigate its composition. We observed the differences between healthy growing soil and compacted soil.

Back at school, our class made a chart to describe: what we knew, what we learned and what we wondered about "soil".

After snapping some digital photos in the forest, our students used PowerPoint to label areas of healthy growing soil and compacted soil. Shown below is Parwez's work from Rm 208.

Signs of Spring

It's Spring!

Warm days cause the meadow to awaken! Migrating birds have returned, babies are born and flowers burst forth.

On our walk this week, students were asked to observe and record all the signs of Spring that they noticed. The students were asked to use all their senses to make their observations.

Back at school, the students used Smart Ideas 5.0 to map out their observations. Shown here is work by Reese, Adnan and Parwez.

Multiplication in Real Life

Who knew there was so much multiplication in the real world? On one of our Walking Wednesdays, the students were asked to look for examples of multiplication in the neighbourhood. After taking some pictures, the students were asked to use Powerpoint to demonstrate multiplication as the repeated addition of equal groups.(Shown below is work by Matthew, Jacob and Parwez.

Parallel Lines

We took another walk through our community looking for mathematical concepts. This time we were on the look-out for examples of parallel lines. They were easy to find! After taking some digital photos, the students used PowerPoint to highlight the parallel lines in yellow. Shown below is work by Jeremiah and Timothy.

Animal Tracks

When Winter arrived, the meadow was a different place from when we had first visited in the Fall. The flowers and insects were gone. The green and gold of lush grasses and wild flowers had been replaced by the white, brown and gray of snow and dormant vegetation. The busy buzzing of insects and chirping birds had gone silent, but that didn't mean that there were no more interesting things to discover. The turning of the seasons gave our students new opportunities to make observations. They immediately noticed all the different animal tracks in the snow: evidence that there were still living things in the meadow! This led our students on an investigation of animal prints. Students were asked to make sketches of animal prints that they thought might be found in the meadow. Here are Areen's and Amir's sketches done on KidPix:

Whittamore's Farm

In the Fall, students from Rouge Valley went on a field trip to Whittamore's Farm to get an idea of what rural life was like. As part of Walking Wednesdays, students had been learning about the features of an urban community. Afterward, they were asked to make a chart to compare rural areas with urban areas. Here are two examples by Ashwinni and Megan.

Butterfly Life Cycle

Early in September, our three classes had begun studying the butterfly life cycle. We started with some caterpillars and began our observations. The caterpillar formed a chrysalis and eventually transformed into a Painted Lady Butterfly. After it hatched we released the butterfly in our meadow. Here are some of the pics that we took for our observations as well as Ashwinni's (Rm 209) labeled diagram of the butterfly life cycle.