Monday 23 January 2017

A new unit with the new year

We began the year by reflecting on the past few months at school and setting a goal for the coming semester.



Unit of Inquiry
Our fourth unit of Inquiry - Forces affect the movement and shape of objects.
We have been exploring a lot of science in the past two weeks. 

Tuning in
To begin the unit, we did an activity to learn about the relative location and position of objects.


We used our communication skills to instruct our partner how to build the structure that we built using positional words.

We moved on to assessing our prior knowledge on force. We went outside and tried to move the chair. We then tried to move the chair with our friends sitting on it.  The difference in the effort it took made us think about push, pull, swaying, muscle power, force etc.


Working on a Venn diagram on push and pull


Provocations.....
We were given different statements on sheets and we went around in our groups.....shared our thoughts and views......lastly as a group we wrote down what we had collectively thought.

We worked at different stations. We were provided with marbles and straws. They were laid on different surfaces and we were asked to move the marble by blowing with the straw. These stations helped us to understand that force of the air we blew helped move the marbles.



Some of our discussions/discoveries......





Finding out
We began with inquiring into forces that exist in our daily lives. Gravity is the first one we took on.
We watcehd some videos and made a KWl chart to help organise our thoughts and prior knowledge on the subject.


Post that we moved on to understanding the intensity of the gravity pull. We tried different experiments to understand that the pull depends on the mass of the object.






Language
As we will be learning and exploring a lot of science laws we though of taking up studying about some famous scientists who have discovered important things to help make our lives easier and make sense of the world around us.

We began by understanding what biography is.


We read about some famous people and chose one person that we would want to know more about                              

Planning
Next we went on to sorting information into categories to help plan our writing


Drafting
We then went on to draft our first drafts


Revising
Working on writing an interesting introduction for our biographies


We are also reading an autobiography of Leon Walter Tillage as our class novel


Math
In Math, we are working wit the concept of multiplication

We began by understanding what it means to multiply


Making sense of the times tables


Working with multiplying two digit number with a single digit number using our understanding of place value

BUILD time
B - Salute Math Facts card game
U - Area dice game
I - NOGGLE ( Add or subtract to make 20)
L - Number puzzles
D - Computer time


Common Sense Media
We learnt all about what makes a website right for us. We went on to different websites and
 then rated the site on the basis of how child friendly they were.


We have also been working on our digital portfolio using Seesaw



Our 4th Annual Sports day was so so so much fun!!!

A peak into one of our opening performances





Some fun races with parents...