Wednesday, October 24, 2018

Seeds

We started investigating seeds by examining them with magnifying glasses and sorting them by size, shape and color.   









We cut open our pumpkin and scooped out the seeds. 


We put 10 seeds into each small cups to help us count so many seeds. 


We counted by 10's and made two groups of 100.  We ended up with 247 seeds from the pumpkin.



We put our seeds into a sprout house to see them start to grow.  We put in apple seeds, pumpkin seeds and one acorn seed.  We wonder which one will sprout and grow a root. 



After two weeks some acorns and apple seeds have roots!  We put the seeds into soil to help them grow more roots.  










One little seed can become one little sprout and eventually one big fruit or vegetable!





Saturday, October 13, 2018

Primary Art

Students in the K-1  art class with Mrs.Gardner began the year with an opportunity to really look at mirrors to see how their unique features line up to create their unique selves.  Children experimented with modeling clay to make clay balls, clay coils, clay spirals and clay slabs to reproduce their features on paper heads.   They later drew their faces on the heads with markers and are now creating box sculptures of their whole bodies utilizing those paper heads.  They are looking at the box sculptures by the Spanish sculptor Marisol and learning about shape versus form as well as balance as they figure out which boxes to use to get their sculpture to stand in space.   Soon they will be painting their sculptures and adding paper, yarn, and other collage materials to complete the appendages, hair, and hands.










Magnets Push and Pull!

      Attract, Pull, Repel, and Push, are words we use to describe the motions and polarity of magnets. We learned about how magnets work so that we do not just think they are magic! We saw lots of examples of magnets working, learned about the north and south poles of a magnet, and listened to a clear explanation of polarity, through videos and books.   We demonstrated polarity using some of the same magnets that we had used during our investigation of what magnets do.


'How do magnets work?' 







"We learned how some forces, like pushes and pulls, have to have direct contact. In other words, you have to touch something to push it. With a magnet, that is not always true. There are forces called 'unseen' forces -  forces you do not see. We discovered magnets have a 'magnetic field' around them. It isn't like a field with flowers and grass. It is an invisible area that has the force to move metal things. 



We learned that the earth is a giant magnet with a North Pole, 
a South Pole and a Magnetic field. 
The compass points to the North Pole.