This past month our school has had many whole school learning opportunities related to the brain. We even got to look at and hold animal brains brought by visiting scientists. Honestly, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Would the kids want to touch the exhibits? Of course they did! One Super Kid even wondered how many thoughts were in the brain as she held it in her hands.
We headed back to the classroom and read “Your Fantastic Elastic Brain”. This book explains the parts of the brain perfectly for our age group. How do we stretch our brains? We then shared things and activities we have learned, what we’re learning, and what we want to learn.
Our learning buddies classroom created a huge inflatable brain in our main floor learning commons. The class loved exploring it and learning from the 5/6 kids. “We’re the thoughts Mrs. Didyk!” 🙂
The Super Kids have become astronomers! The class has been busy researching planets, the sun, and the moon. Using non-fiction information books and the pebble go website, the class has been learning all about the solar system. Working together, the Super Kids created their very own space ship!
The moon doesn’t produce any light of its own. It reflects the light of the sun. The shadows create the moon phases. What are shadows? This started a focus on creating our own shadows and reading some great books from our school library. We created tin foil people and created shadows with them too!
The Super Blue Blood Moon was yesterday! It won’t happen again unit 2037. Early in the morning the moon (which is the second of the month and 14% larger then normal) turned a red colour because it was a lunar eclipse! The morning was spent watching NASA’s feed, which showed the moon going through all of its phases and then turn red. We learning why it doesn’t just disappear and wondered if the astronauts in the space station would see it too. The moon dog is a rare occurrence, but it happened yesterday morning too! The picture below was sent to me by a friend of mine and I had to share it with he class. Moon dogs occur when you can see the lunar halo because there is ice crystals in the air which causes refraction. So much to learn about the moon in one day!
We read the book “Once In A Blue Moon” by Danielle Daniel . Perfect for the occasion!
The book is a poem that talks about rare occurrences in nature. The Super Kids then created their own poetry in the style of the book. Mrs. G, my teaching partner, has this wonderful idea! We’ll share our poetry with you when we’re done. 🙂
On another note, the winter Olympics are started next week. Our classroom is excited to watch and learn about the different sports and cheer on the Canadian team. We created our own caldron this afternoon!
February is full of exciting learning opportunities! Stay tuned…
