Water Festival Recap

Session 1 - learning about rivers...how they move, how they affect the areas around them, how things impact the river, etc.

Session 2 - Taste testing water. Did you know that 0.003% of Earth's water is usable fresh water? That's not a lot! :)

Session 3 - discussing city sewers (routed to water treatment plants) and storm sewers (routed to the river) and how pollution affects the storm sewers and the rivers they drain to

Station 4 - The water Olympics. I'll let the photos tell the story. 

Last, but not least, "Mr. History" (Steve Stark)! I could listen to this guy all day!!!

What a good looking group of kids, don't you think?

Owl Pellets!

Check out what we are doing today!!! This is easily one of the favorites for the year, and my favorite part of the project is when the "Ewwwwws" turn into "Cool!" 

What are owl pellets? Basically, after an owl swallows its prey (whole), its stomach digests all the parts of the animal that it can. What's left is bones and fur. The owl then regurgitates (or, in kid terms, pukes up) this "pellet." For those of you getting queasy right now, they are sanitized before they are sent to us!!! :)

Our process:

1. make observations about size, shape, texture, and color
2. break it in two
3. partners begin working together to separate bones from fur
4. categorize bones into the different areas of the skeleton & determine if the animal is a rodent, shrew, mole, or bird
5. glue bones onto a copy of a skeleton to reconstruct their animal's body

We should be able to wrap up the project today, so look for some part of a skeleton to come home!

And There was Light!

We are just beginning the electricity phase of our Magnetism and Electricity Unit in science, and to begin we are exploring energy sources. Our energy source for our experiments are D-cells (aka: D batteries), and on Friday we began to experiment with designing circuits. Allissa and Andre were the first to successfully light their bulb!

Mock Rocks & Geologists

Our first unit in science is EARTH MATERIALS, and we are learning about geology. GEOLOGY is the study of earth. GEOLOGISTS study the materials on earth, specifically rocks. Over the coming weeks we will break our rocks down using several processes to discover how geologists test real rocks, and to determine the difference between ROCKS and MINERALS. Here is our first step...we used nails as our picks, but discovered that we needed a little more power behind to get them broken in half. Hence, our creative use of highlighters as well! The top pictures show the students hard at work, and the bottom show the results of our efforts yesterday. SO MUCH FUN!!!