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Making & Transmitting Sounds

2/27/2021

In our recent work on our Hearing and Sound unit, we’ve been learning about how instruments make sounds with striking, plucking, or blowing, and the students made their own instruments in class (we’ll do more extensive instrument building later in the unit). We explored instruments from around the world, and then experimented to find out how sound is transmitted through gases, liquids, and solids. Next week we get to learn about how our human ears sense sound!

Services and Culture in Peru

2/26/2021

This week in Social Studies we learned about services and culture in Peru, and celebrated our own Carnavale inspired by Peruvians celebrations! The students especially enjoyed learning about the yunza tree tradition, and we had fun spraying water and listening to Peruvian music. You can watch an example of a yunza tree celebration below (we engaged in a less dangerous version in our class)!

Pink Shirt Day

2/26/2021

The students' art with their plans of how to make Millgrove a welcoming place

We took part in Pink Shirt Day on Wednesday and the students had a lot of ideas about how to stand up to bullying behaviour and get help when we need it. Pink Shirt Day began in 2007 when a student in Nova Scotia was bullied for wearing a pink shirt to school. It has since been recognized annually worldwide as a day to stand against bullying. We read some books about making school a welcome environment, and the students brainstormed ideas of how we can make Millgrove an inclusive environment for everyone and wrote their personal plans on silhouettes of their hands. You can watch the story The Invisible Boy below for an example of why Pink Shirt Day is so important!

Sound Walk

2/25/2021

On our Participark walk today, we paused at a few different points along the way and paid attention to the sounds we observed in nature. We noticed the sounds of birds, melting snow running through the storm drain, wind rustling the branches and leaves, squirrels chirping, and our footsteps in the snow. In the context of our Science unit on Hearing and Sound, it was fun to experience all the sounds around us!

Paddle Sports

2/24/2021

We've been working on our skills in different paddle sports this month, and this week the class started practicing some skills in Pickleball. Next week we'll try playing some games which the students are excited for. You can see more about Pickleball below!

Fairy Tale Celebration

2/19/2021

This week we wrapped up our unit on writing fairy tales! The students each wrote three fairy tales over the course of our unit, and then chose their favourite one to turn into a final draft. They’ve worked hard on using narration, description, dialogue, punctuation, tense, dialogue, and paragraphs to create engaging and sophisticated stories. Many of them were very amusing, and the class was thrilled to wrap up the unit with a celebration of fairy tales and the stories they had written. You can watch some of the fairy tales from around the world that we learned about this week as well and see a couple of examples of the students’ fairy tales!

Hearing and Sound

2/17/2021

We’re starting a new Science unit this month on Hearing and Sound! In this unit students will explore the nature of sound, its sources, its qualities and what it is. They will learn that sound is vibration and that changes in vibration can affect the loudness, pitch and quality of sound. We will talk about sound travel by studying what things carry sound, what things make it louder or softer, and what happens to sound when it reaches their ears. The sensitivity of human ears and those of other animals will be examined, as students learn about the safe use of this valuable sense.

In the coming weeks, students will learn to:

Identify examples of vibration.
Recognize that sound is the result of vibration; and demonstrate that the larger the vibration, the louder the sound.
Recognize that there are ways of measuring the loudness of sounds and that loud sounds pose a danger to the ear.
Recognize that pitch is the result of differences in the rate of vibration, and predict how a change in the rate of vibration will affect a sound.
Demonstrate a variety of ways of producing sounds; e.g., by striking an empty glass, by blowing air into a bottle, by constructing and using a device that involves vibrating strings.
Use sound-producing devices that the student has constructed to demonstrate methods for controlling the loudness, pitch and quality of sound produced.
Identify examples that show that sound can travel through a variety of materials, including solids, liquids and air, and that sound travels in all directions.
Describe how the human ear senses vibrations.
Compare the range of hearing in humans to that in other animals; e.g., dogs and bats.
Recognize that certain sounds have characteristics that cause them to be interpreted as pleasant or unpleasant, and identify these characteristics.
Describe changes in hearing that result from continued exposure to loud noise and from the natural process of aging.
Construct and evaluate different kinds of soundproofing and sound-amplifying devices.
Explain the role that sound plays in communication.

Lunar New Year

2/12/2021

We had a great time learning about Lunar New Year this week! We learned from books and some online research about this special holiday, and the students were especially interested to learn about their Chinese Zodiac sign and learn how to do some Chinese calligraphy. Our class learned about the history of the Lunar New Year celebrations, and we got to partake in the celebrations with our own Hongbao (red envelopes) and special New Year candy. Happy Year of the Ox! Gong hei fat choy!

Bridge Competition

2/11/2021

We capped off our bridge-building project this week! The students finished joining their beams, decks, and trusses, and we tested them in our bridge competition. There were three stages to the competition:

Can the bridge support the mass of the self-driving vehicle?
Can the self-driving vehicle successfully drive from one side of the bridge to another?
How much mass can the bridge support before it has a structural failure?

There were many cheers and gasps as we marveled at the strength of our bridges, and all the bridges were very impressive! You can see the photos and video below of this week's competition.

Valentine's Celebration

2/11/2021

We had a great Valentine's Day celebration in 3B! We exchanged Valentine cards, watched Because of Winn-Dixie after finishing the book this week, and enjoyed the delicious treats that parents sent in for each student. The class very thoughtfully reflected that some of their favourite moments were their friends receiving the Valentine's they'd written, which was quite sweet. There are plenty of great friendships to be celebrated in 3B!