November books and SLIME!

 We have some November themed books on display for the children to read.  

Also, a beautiful poem that I have already heard lots of littles repeating throughout their day.

To finish our matter unit off we made slime!  The kids were very excited about this.

Mrs. Liebel taught a beautiful lesson on how even teachers make mistakes!  haha.  I have made slime in the past and funny enough I loved this recipe because each student could make an individual amount of slime.  However, I must've read it wrong and had the kids just add borax powder to their slime instead of making it into a Borax solution.  haha... oh it was a fun lesson indeed!  

BUT I totally redeemed myself!  We tried to make slime again today and we were very successful.  

** This is the "epic fail" (as the kids would say) picture of the children adding borax powder.  

So, if you plan to make slime with your child at home please don't make the mistake I did.  Also, a great website to make a variety of slime is this one: https://www.stevespanglerscience.com/lab/experiments/glue-borax-gak/

Why are so many toys made out of plastic?

Today the children learned about the solid and liquid states of matter.  They also discovered why plastic was invented!  In the experiment below, they tested out the "meltable" properties of candy!  We had to choose the best candy to send to our friends at Camp Way-Too-Hot.

For this experiment each team was given two bags of candy, and hot water.  

 We placed the candy in the hot water to see which candies could withstand the heat!

This was a great experiment to do today (the day after Halloween).  The kids were engaged and loved squishing the candies after the experiment was done.

We also watched some additional videos of other matter being changed including metal and glass!

Glass Melting:

http://safeyoutube.net/w/FYzb

Glass Melting 2:

http://safeyoutube.net/w/TYzb

Metal Melting:

http://safeyoutube.net/w/P9m

Halloween and Solid Matter

Our Halloween books are out on display and the kids were very excited to swap their books today for new ones.  

In Science today, we wanted to test an idea about solids.  If solids were to be broken down would they still weigh the same as when they were whole?  Is a solid still a solid when it's broken down?  We weighed paper before and after it was ripped into little pieces and noticed it weighed the same.  We weighed plastercine in one large ball then broke it down into little pieces and noticed it weighed the same as well.

How can you knock down a wall made of concrete?

This was the question that we were presented with.  We watched an amazing video by mystery science on all the different ways concrete could be taken down: hammer, bomb, wrecking ball.  Then we had a brief talk about the Berlin Wall and how it might have been knocked down.  We learned that the force of the wrecking ball will either knock down just the wall or knock down the houses behind the wall too.  Little force = knocks down the wall, more force = knocks down the wall and the houses.

Here is a short clip of the experiment in action.  This was done at the very beginning when I realized they needed to hold it from the wrecking ball, not the string.

Link to the mystery science lesson: https://mysteryscience.com/pushes/mystery-2/strength-direction-of-force/104?r=7709593

Our First Week Back

We sure had a fun, and exciting first week back at school.  We started our own businesses, we began our Science unit on living things, we created Snow people/animals using our "Good Stuff."  

 ^ I just love this picture.  I like to think this is how most of the kids feel as they are learning in this classroom.  Learning is so much fun!

 We started our Science unit on living things and our first task was to find things in magazines that are living and not living.  We had a good discussion on what characteristics define something as living.

In Writing, we started this game called Monster Match.  If you want a better idea of how this game is played I have the link to the video which is where I got the idea from.  The kids are so excited to play this game with the Beaverdell Elementary students.  We will be video conferencing with them this Wednesday to see if they can draw the monsters we will be explaining.  This is also a great game to play with your children at home.  We started the lesson with a really bad example and the kids were very frustrated that they couldn't draw the monster because it was so poorly explained.  They understood that they needed to think and write everything they had drawn on their monsters for them to match.

In art, we read the book Snowballs by Lois Ehlers.  Lois is one of my favourite artists and I love sharing her world with the kids.  They get so excited to read her books and create!  This book inspired us to collect "good stuff" as she calls it and use that stuff to create interesting snow figures.  The kids were created snow cats, dogs, Mom's, Dad's, girls, boys, etc.  I am hoping to display their artwork this week!

 ^ I had two specials helpers that day!  One helped organize, help students, and just overall helpful the other one was quite disastrous.  

It was so much fun this week and I can't wait to see what next week entails.  Have a great weekend everyone!