Food Chains

 This week, we shifted our focus in unit from "What makes up an ecosystem" to "The interconnectedness of living things within an ecosystem." Considering the interactions and relationships between the living things lead us to inquire into food chains! To begin, the students created their own KWL (Know, Wonder, and Learnt) Chart. They added in things that they felt they already knew about the topic of food chains, as well as questions or wondering about things that they want to know or learn about food chains. After doing this, a few students shared their thinking of what they felt they knew about food chains, and then students drew and labeled pictures of food chains.

To find out more, we watched a Mystery Science video about food chains and enjoyed playing a food chain card game in small groups called, "Eat or Be Eaten!" This, and the follow-up lesson really helped us to understand the different parts of food chains, and lead us to the conclusion that plants are at the low end of the food chain, followed by a herbivore (plant-eater), then one or more carnivores (meat-eaters). 

From there, we began inquiring into 'How do plants grow?' 'Do plants eat?' and 'Do plants poo or create waste?" The students began researching these questions today and will create a poster together with a partner on Tuesday to show their understanding of what they discovered in their research and will do a short presentation about their poster to the rest of the class on Wednesday.

In math, students started putting their knowledge of line plots to the test by creating their own survey questions for their classmates and then made a line plot of their own to show the data. After creating it by hand in their math notebooks they started making good copies of it digitally on Seesaw. Next week they will complete the activity which also requires them to make a question and answer sheet about the data in their line plot. We ended the week with a line plot review by playing a game on Kahoot.

In PE, we continued playing various cooperative games. This week we focussed more on small group or partner games. Some of the games we played were Time Machine where 2 players use a hula hoop as a time machine portal. One player stands in the hula hoop and the other has to lift it over the first player and then put it on the ground in front of the first player who then jumps into the portal moving forward in place and time. They repeat this until the player has crossed the playground and then the players swap roles. We also played two similar games, Frogs Across the Pond, and Loggers, all of which involved teammates helping each other across the playground.

We also played a new tag game called, Two's Company, Three is a Crowd, and Boom Ball where teams battled each other by trying to knock a basketball into another team's zone by throwing balls at it.

Spare Masks

Please make sure that your child has at least one spare mask each day, occasionally they get dirty, wet, sweaty, or have straps that break off by accident so the child should always be ready just in case. I did have a couple spares on hand in the classroom but my supply is getting low. Thanks for your cooperation.