Category: Scientists

In Science we are learning All About Penguins! So far we have discovered the penguins’ habitat, diet, eating habits, order of the food chain, stages of the life cycle and the physical differences among the various species of penguins.

Today in Art we became an expert on a specific species of penguins. It is safe to say that Little Blue Penguin was by far the most popular species of penguin because they are so incredibly small and cute. Ask your young scientist + artist what penguin they chose to study. In Art today, we were bringing our Science to life and were beginning our life size sketch of our penguin of study. Stay tuned for any changes that occur outside our hallway as the March of Penguins may be taking place there in the coming weeks.

Ask your young scientist the following:

• what is sound?     —–> with your family try to identify 3 different sounds around your house (i.e., the dog barking, birds chirping, the tv playing, the baby crying, the springs on the trampoline, the water sprinkler, the popcorn popping).
• how does sound travel?    —–> can sounds travel through liquids, solids and gases? In what state of material do you think sounds travel the slowest?
• what is an echo?     —–> when sound waves reach an object, some of the waves bounce back. We sometimes hear these sound waves as an echo. What causes the sound of thunder? **hint, think about lighting and vibrations**

   Try this at home:

Seeing Sound

What you will need: a bowl covered with plastic wrap, a pinch of salt or dry sand, a loudspeaker connected to a music system

Procedure:

• put the bowl close to the front of the loudspeaker
• sprinkle some salt or dry sand on top of the plastic wrap
• play some music through the loudspeaker. Music with low notes works best. What happens to the sand/salt?

What happened?

Sound waves from the loudspeaker travel through the air. They cause the air to vibrate, which then causes the plastic wrap to vibrate. The plastic wrap will make a noise, but you probably cannot heat it because of the music. You can see the vibrations making the salt or the sand move and bounce around on the plastic wrap.

What is it called when some high-pitched sounds are too high for us to hear? How are ultrasounds used or helpful in our community or daily life?

We are currently talking all about energy, energy is the ability to do work, there are three different types of energy, this includes light, heat and sound.

Can you look around yourself and identify the various energy sources for objects? What type of energy is a boiling kettle, the radio, the toaster, a flashlight, a burning candle, a sprinkler, wind chimes, your brother laughing?

Part 2: Today we moved from being able to identify the different types of energy to generating our very own list of objects that produce either heat, light or sound energy (sometimes more than one type of energy can be produced!). Let’s see if you can categorize the following ideas into the correct energy source: the shaking of a water bottle, glow in the dark toys, a rock splash in the lake, the wind, a baseboard heater, flashlight, a wolf howl, moonlight, train whistle and sunlight.

We have been exploring many aspects of light through exploration centres this past week.

We have each planted a bean and pea seed and are simultaneously learning about the plant life cycle as well as the interaction between plants and light.

We are observing on a daily basis that plants grow towards the sun. We are now able to identify and distinguish between natural and artificial light sources.

By exploring the different light stations we learned about the following:

We learned about REFRACTION: it appears that the pencil in the water is split in half, but is it really? Why does it appear that it is split? What is the light doing?

We are now able to identity what materials are TRANSPARENT, TRANSLUCENT and OPAQUE.

We understand that interactions of light with different objects create images and shadows. Ask your young scientist about the incident ray of light and the reflected ray. What is happening to the light when it reflects off a surface?

The First Peoples’ story, The Sun and the Moon by Celestine Aleck, illustrated by Cole Good beautifully conveyed the important relationship between the Sun and the Moon.

In this Coast Salish story, to help make their children happy, the Sun and the Moon make the difficult choice to part from each other. The Creator allows them to visit only at the time of an eclipse and at sunrise and sunset. The great love between the sun and the moon can be seen in the beauty of those times.

Again, our recent Science discoveries inspired yet another Art lesson. We created an Art piece that signifies the important and loving relationship between the Sun and the Moon. This was a two step process as we first used crayons to colour in our sun and moon. The following day we then applied a watercolour wash over our illustration to finish our piece.