Month: May 2019

Is it just me, or is time racing by as we are approaching the end of the school year? Do you know what time it is? How many more minutes until recess? How many more hours until lunch? How many more minutes until centres? Today we were practicing identifying the hour of the clock.

Quick tip: the little hand will always point to the hour and the big hand will tell us how many minutes.

Next time your child is asking you what time it is, encourage them to take a risk and try telling YOU the time!

We are fortunate to be having Ultimate Frisbee coaches here at Parkcrest this week to be teaching us new skills. Monday was our first day of Ultimate Frisbee, we learned the proper technique to throw a frisbee and to successfully catch it. Today will be our second day and we are REALLY looking forward to the experience. I wonder what we will learn today?

The next time you are outside of Div 6, check out our Acrostic Name Poems. We worked hard in the computer lab, practicing our typing skills as well as our spelling (we did our best in identifying each letter sound that we heard in the word, Mrs.Ralph may have helped us a little bit with the spelling of really difficult words). Our objective was to use describing words and/or sentences to describe ourselves.

Can you think of an Acrostic Poem for Summer? I started a poem, can you help me finish it?

Sparkling sunshine in a clear blue sky

Unpack a picnic lunch at the beach

Make a beautiful sandcastle

M

E

R

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.