All the ideas you and classmates have about how food gets from farm to table.
The Key Question
Heifer International Global Village processing discussion after spending the night in the village. There are sufficient resources on our planet to feed all 7 billion of us twice over, and yet there are people even in our own city and state who don’t know where their next meal will come from.
October 7/8, 2013
Exploring density and learning about new lab tools by making colored salt water solutions.
October 4, 2013
Taking a day to look at what’s possible with “stuff” when we know how to describe and manipulate it. Our work in the 1st quarter has focused on describing stuff scientifically. Today, we’re watching David Pogue’s Nova: Making Stuff Stronger to learn about how materials scientists are using their knowledge of “stuff” to build stronger things to make our lives better, safer and more interesting.
October 3, 2013
Learning how to measure the volume of objects using an overflow can and a graduated cylinder. Another tool and another way for us to describe the sizes of things.
September 30, 2013
Stacking liquids in a clever potato/straw apparatus. Tomorrow, new/different liquids but with the same apparatus.
September 23, 2013
Measuring perimeter and area of boxes as we prepare to find out who maximizes advertising space but minimizes product sold.
5th Graders took a computer skills quiz today. Very basic stuff was on the quiz: send me an email from your school email account and create and share a Google document with me. One class made a little headway with the spreadsheet, and oohh’ed and ahh’ed at the creation of a formula that adds the sides of a rectangle to give you the perimeter.
September 17, 2013
We wrapped up our metric mapping project yesterday, and today discussed the artist Christo’s installation in Biscayne Bay in 1983. In order to do this, Christo had to measure the perimeter of all of the islands around which he hoped to wrap this pink material. It’s a sticky image of what perimeter actually is. We practiced measuring the perimeter of the middle school’s larger buildings, created diagrams and began to enter this information into a spreadsheet in Google Drive, which will be a useful tool as we use metric measurement to collect data this year.
September 11, 2013
We’re working on a campus measurement project where students were assigned a location on campus and are producing a multimedia set of directions to that spot. Yesterday, I did a workshop in each class on how to create a Google Map from our science classroom to any spot on campus, then how to share that map in a group project. Students were surprised to see that you can see the picnic tables outside our classroom from a satellite and that there are photos of this on the internet for anyone to look at.
180 Days of 5th Grade Science 