Expressing Ourselves with Sound and Light

 This week the students starting putting together what they had learnt throughout the unit about the principles of light and sound and explored them creatively. 

To begin, they completed their paintings about what the different colours symbolize.

Then after a short review test to see what they could recall about sound and light they explored the Chrome Music Lab and experimented with sounds. The various interactive activities available here let them play around with sound oscillations, online pianos, Kandinsky inspired activity that turns a drawing into sound, and a song maker that allows them to control the tempo, timbre, rhythm, sounds and percussion beat that could be saved and shared. Since we had discussed the meaning/ feelings/ associated with colours it was only right that we inquired into how sounds can also influence our feelings. The students chose a feeling or emotion to create a song to, using Song Maker. 

Finally, over the last few days the students got together and were given the task of creating some type of performance that combined sound and light to tell a story or expressed some type of emotion.

One group of girls created a short shadow play story of a mermaid being attacked by a monster. 

The other group of girls performed a skeleton dance with black lights.

And the boys decided to make a paper shadow puppet play and will have a chance to perform next Monday.

Finally, in Math we learnt about angles and direction, and have just begun symmetry:

Let There Be Light!

 This week our focus was all about the properties of light and how we can use it to help us express ourselves.

On Monday, we completed the four experiments that we began last Friday.

Then we began a research project to find out how colours influence and symbolize different feelings and emotions. The students each chose a colour to research and then wrote down notes about the different meanings associated with that colour. Then they created a poster of that colour to show the different meanings and symbols that were connected to it.

During PE, we also explored how music and colours can influence our moods and movements. We tried to do some expressive dance to the beat of several different types of music.

 

Happy New Year!

 I hope everyone had an enjoyable winter holiday. The grade 2 students were happy to be back at school with their friends this week and we continued right from where we left off with in our unit on sound and light. 

To finish off the first part of our inquiry into sound, the students worked on creating and copying rhythms as the expressed themselves in the classroom, playground and kitchen. 

Then we flipped the switch and began our inquiry on light and started learning about the properties of light by completing four experiments. 

We learned that light is a type of energy and the it can pass through materials that are transparent and translucent, but blocked by those which are opaque. The experiments also helped us discover that white light contains all the colours of the rainbow as we played around with some prisms, as well as some polarized sunglasses, and redirected light with lenses from magnifying lenses and refracted light as it passed from air to water. Next week, we will continue to experiment with light and colours some more!