Thursday, 14 May 2015

Air and Water in the Environment

Our final Science topic of the year will be to learn about the roles of Air and Water in our lives. 
Our daily calendar time now includes monitoring the wind speed and direction using the weather station that we have on top of our school. 



 Thanks to the West Souris River Conservation District for buying and installing this unit a few years ago.  We plot the findings on a line graph every day.



To be able to use the design process in this unit, students have been given the assignment to create wind chimes with the following criteria.
  1. The chimes must be made from reused materials
  2. They must make noise in the wind and
  3. They must be solidly constructed. 
We have discussed it in class and students should be making a plan for their design and bringing in materials to use to construct the chimes May 19 - 22. 

We also studied water and came up with as many names for "Water" as we could.  Lake, drop, river, ocean, wave, hail, and flood were a few from the list.  The Water Cycle is a very interesting concept and especially the fact that the same water we have now was around in the dinosaur times!  Bill Nye the Science Guy has excellent educational videos and part of his one on Water Cycles is below.


We took the Science study to Art class and used coloured chalk on black paper to create representations of the water cycle. 



The words : evaporation, condensation, precipitation and collection are central to our discussions.
 One of our favourite YouTube songs about the Water Cycle is here. Ask your child what they know about Air and Water in their Environment!

3 comments:

  1. Is the design sheet to be completely filled out during the week of 19-22 or just the materials gathered??

    ReplyDelete
  2. We will work on the design sheets in class using the materials that they bring this week and/or things I have collected. I sent the sheets home so families would know why kids were gathering materials and could start planning the design.

    ReplyDelete