Evergreen theatre

For a whole week our school participated in the Evergreen Theatre's Artist in residence program. We had an Evergreen artist working with us everyday to develop our own play about the needs of plant and animals. Our artist was Ian and he was a lot of FUN! One of the days he was here he brought his drum and we moved in many different ways to the drum beats. One day he brought a beaver pelt and he let us feel it and then told us a story about how beavers almost became extinct! We played crazy games with him like SPLAT and Bibbity, bibbity BOP! The games were our favourite part and kept us thinking and laughing!

Here we are being worms!

Here we are playing SPLAT!

Our play was about the needs of plants and animals. We took on the roles of plants, animals and cowboys and cowgirls on the open range! Mrs. Draper even took on the role of a bear! It was a lot of FUN!

Engineers at work!

This past week we worked on designing and building cars! First we looked at various different pictures of different kinds of race cars and we also looked at toy cars. This sparked a discussion about the kinds of cars our parents drive. The children were interested! We talked about the different features of the cars we had pictures of. The children made observations through drawings and notes. 
Then I had them draw a design of a car they would like to build. They drew and they labelled. Then I gave them a challenge! I provided the kids with straws, paper, tape and peppermint lifesavers. I placed all the materials in each child's own ziploc baggie. The challenge was to build a car that would move on it's wheels down the length of two meter sticks and blown by a hand held fan.  
The children were so excited to get building!! They built and tested and changed things and  tried new ideas! It was awesome! 
One of my little girls had a very successful design and test, so she immediately became the class expert! Everyone was asking for her "advice"! So cool! This was a wonderful set of lessons to go with our "Building Things" unit in Science! 

Trying out the hand held fan to make the car move.

Our cars displayed

Our "Expert" engineer! 

Trying out a new add on design

Adding more details and figuring out that less weight is better! 

Trying out a "sail" 

Very proud of her design! 

Hallway races!

Science is my favourite!

I honestly love teaching SCIENCE! 
It is just so fun! I think I like it because it is hands-on learning at it's best! 
This past week we did two hands on experiments. 
We made Flick YoYo's with chop sticks and wrapping paper. It was part of our building things unit. 

We also had a wonderful time working on our Science Inquiry unit. We worked on discovering what dissolves and what does not dissolve. I explained to the children that when something that is a solid is in solid form it is holding hands really tightly and when it "goes swimming" in the water it lets go of hands and then it will "disappear" into the water.

The kids had lots of questions and they were really observing very well and drawing their own conclusions. It was really fun to watch and listen to them!  

The kids really worked well on this experiment. I love my little scientists!