Science
Exploring, Planting, Discovering, and Asking questions
The children were busy doing several different things in science this week. Some classes have been learning about the planets and focus on a different one each day. Other classes combined science with writing while learning about astronauts and how they do their jobs. Ms. Jones's class read a book about astronauts and then wrote a poem about what they would do if they were an astronaut. We also loved watching part of the live video from NASA of two astronauts preparing to make repairs outside of the International Space Station!
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We are blasting off into outer space in science! We have been discussing objects we see in the sky like the sun and the moon. Ms. Jones’s class learned about the different phases of the moon and showed their learning with Oreo cookies! Next week we will try to squeeze in more fun space activities, as the school year comes to a close.
This week we had our culminating event in our plants unit. We took a “field trip” across the street to the middle school and took a look at their full sized greenhouse! It was really too cool, and the children loved it! We got to have questions answered by middle school students, and even Mrs. Humphries, one of our fantastic substitutes! In wrapping up our plants unit, we are keeping it light this week. We are still making daily observations about our plant, and seeing how they develop. We also designed our own seed packets and seeds! The children had a blast coming up with creative ideas for this activity. Check out some of the final products below. Some classes have also combined math and science learning by creating a plant glyph. A glyph is a picture where the details have hidden meaning special to the creator. For example, with this plant glyph, the children chose either pink petals (girl), or blue petals (boy). The middle of their flower shows if they have siblings or are an only child, and the leaves show how many people are in their immediate family. Great job, kiddos! We are carrying on with observing the seeds we have planted. Many of our seeds have sprouted already and are growing like mad! Some of us are continuing with our bean experiment, where we compare bean seeds in sunlight, and without sunlight. The children are absolutely fascinated! Some other activities from this week include: planting a corn kernel, popcorn, and candy corn to see which of them will grow, and observing an aquatic plant to see how plants release oxygen through their leaves. You can actually see the air bubbles as they leave the plant! We love incorporating technology in First Grade, and Gynzy.com is a great resource for us. They had a wonderful matching game for the children to play to reinforce their learning about the parts of the plant, and the role that each part plays. Next week we will begin wrapping up our plants unit to begin our space unit!!!
This week was so much fun for our little scientists! We planted seeds in our classroom greenhouses (which are seriously cool!), in root viewers, and more! We can't wait to see how everything grows. We also did a cool experiment with green bean seeds. We wanted to know if sunlight and soil were truly important for a plant to grow. So we wrapped some green bean seeds in some damp paper towels. One group went in a baggy on the window, and one group went into a baggy that would get no sunlight. The results were very interesting! We learned that sunlight, but not soil, is vital to helping a plant grow (at least at first). We also took a closer look at seeds this week. Some classes had the children bring in seeds and together they figured out what they were. Other classes brought in the food, removed the seeds, and then did a class matching activity. We are so scientific! We have begun to learn about plants this week, with our discussions about living and nonliving things. We also planted beans to see how they grow in different environments. The children were most interested, however, in the new bugs we have been seeing all over the playground! We found ladybug larvae, and the children loved how they felt running around on their hands. We also found a couple of spiders living in some of the bushes, and were absolutely fascinated watching them on their webs. Whoops! No updates this time. Please keep checking back, as we will be starting our plants unit in a couple of weeks!
Since our Texas kickoff a couple of weeks ago, we have had Bluebonnets growing in our rooms. This is leading us into our April science unit which is all about plants! We will have a ton of fun growing plants from seeds, exploring the parts of a plant, and many other fun experiments. We have also completed our learning of landforms! The children really enjoyed making their flip books to show several different kinds of landforms. We loved making them out of Playdoh too! For our Texas unit, we ordered a special “kit” from the Texas Wildlife Service, containing skulls, scat (animal poop), and several other fun activities. The kids had such a great time exploring these materials to learn more about animals you can find in Texas.
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April 2017
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