September 29th

Did You Know…? Four-leafed clovers gain their extra leaves as a result of stress.

Good evening!

We had a very busy day today. It started with our first Virtue Assembly of the year. Together we listened to the Grade 6 classes share a little about this month’s virtue, humility. Then students were reminded of our school’s commitment to anti-bullying and to the anti-bullying pledge that students are asked to take every year. Finally, we discussed our Terry Fox fundraising. The school met it’s goal of $5,000 which meant that Mr. D lost his hair today! As someone in our class today said, “It’s kind of sad. But also kind of funny.” Congratulations to our award winners for the month of September: Risolat, Kylie, Rylan, Chloe, and Ashton (Star Student, Classroom Citizen, Apple Student, Timberlea Spirit, and Reader of the Month), and to our two howler lunch winners: Kylie and Alex H.

In Science today, the Grade 4 students started to discuss decomposers. Using the IPads, the students discovered the following decomposers: worms, slugs, earthworms, flies, beetles, bacteria, fungi, termites, ants, snails, mites, nematodes, leeches, mushrooms, mildew, yeast, houseflies, maggots, mold, cockroaches, centipedes, etc. and shared their findings with one another. We are going to be taking a closer look at two of those decomposers in upcoming classes: mold and nematodes. We started to discuss mold today. We are conducting an experiment to see how long it takes for different foods to mold or decompose. Students each chose an item from their lunch, sealed it in a bag, and will be recording observations of their bag for the next few classes. The apples have already started to change!

The Grade 5 students took a closer look at precipitation. Last week we learned about humidity and about water vapour in the air. This week, we will be looking at the water cycle and precipitation that results from water vapour. Today we discussed rain, snow, sleet, and hail. We also watched an episode of “Magic School Bus” that demonstrates the differences between the four. When warm air rises in the atmosphere, it cools, becoming less able to hold moisture. When the air can no longer hold any moisture, it has become saturated and little water droplets begin to form. We see these droplets as clouds. If it gets colder, the droplets will join together, forming raindrops. If the air is below freezing (0ºC), snow will form. If the droplets freeze when the hit cold surfaces (that are below freezing – 0ºC), we call this sleet or freezing rain. Finally, hail forms when strong updrafts push the raindrops back up into the atmosphere. These drops begin to freeze. As the fall back to earth, they melt, only to be pushed back up by strong updrafts once again. This continues until the layers of ice around that first raindrop are so heavy that they fall to earth as hail. This is why you usually only see hail on stormy, windy days!

Finally, we had a great time enjoying the warm weather as part of our Terry Fox Walk today. We watched the following video to remind ourselves of the significance of Terry Fox’s Marathon of Hope. This video was created by a young man, Jamie McDonald, who ran across Canada collecting money for SickKids 2-3 years ago. You can view more of his videos through his website (http://jamiemcdonald.org/).