Weekly Update - 9th - 13th October

We have just wrapped up another great week of learning! Happy weekend everyone!

Parents please remember that school will be closed this Monday the 16th of October for the Kings Commemoration Day.

UOI - How the World Works / Literacy
This week we got stuck into our research! We started by recording all of our own questions. Then as a class, we decided which questions would make great explanation reports. We came up with a list of rich inquiry questions that we thought would make great investigations.

Before we selected which question we wanted to inquire into, we talked about our learner profile attributes and attitudes for the unit. We reflected on which questions we were curious about and how we might be inquirers to find the answers.



Then we selected our questions for inquiry.

We began our research by reading books, searching websites using kiddle, and watching relevant videos. We discussed our findings in groups.

One of the challenges we faced was putting the information we found into our own words. We practiced how to 'paraphrase' information (rewrite it in our own way). We looked at the 4 R's of paraphrasing;

• Reword – Replace words and phrases with synonyms whenever you can.
• Rearrange – Rearrange words within sentences to make new sentences. You can even rearrange the ideas presented within the paragraph.
• Realize that some words and phrases cannot be changed – names, dates, titles, etc. cannot be replaced, but you can present them differently in your paraphrase.
• Recheck – Make sure that your paraphrase conveys the same meaning as the original text.

This skill will be really important next week as we begin to write an explanation based on our inquiry question. Our explanation will need to include these things:

Scientific Reports

Most groups now have the results from their science experiments and we began to draw conclusions from what we discovered.

It was exciting to see the impact that different environments had on our plant.

We had a session in the lab to type up our findings. Here are two groups examples. Children will share these with you on seesaw next week.

Our Science Experiment

Names: Eira and Soyul

Question: Which part of flowers soak up water?

Hypothesis: We do not think it will grow. We think the leaves will change colour.

Materials:

• Scientists cups (test tubes)
• Flowers
• Water
• Food colouring

Steps:

1. First  we put food colouring in the containers

2. Then we put water in the containers

3. Then we put one flower in each colour.                               

Results:

In an hour later saw that it start to change. We see colour in the petals. Then four hours later we saw that it came to dye all the petals.

Conclusion: The stem soaks up water. It goes to all parts of a flower.

When we finished we put half the stem in one colour and half in another. Soyul thought they yellow and red would make an orange flower, Eira thought the flower would be ½ red and ½ yellow.

What do you think happened?

My Science Experiment

Names: Thai Hak and Somnang

Question: Can we grow a plant without seeds?

Hypothesis: We think the sweet potato will grow big. We think you can plant without a seed.

Steps:

1. We cut the sweet potato in half.
2. We filled up a jar of water.
3. We poked the potato with chopsticks to hold it still.
4. We put the sweet potato just the water.

Results:

After 1 week nothing happened and it started to smell a little bit.

Now after 2 weeks it started to sprout. On the bit in the water it got white spots.

Conclusion:

We have only been doing our experiment for two weeks. Our sweet potato has started to sprout from some of the holes. We looked at Ms Courtney’s sweet potato and it has a lot of sprouts and has started to have roots. This picture shows what will happen if it keeps growing. We found out that you can grow a plant without seeds. On the internet it said you can make up to 50 slip sprouts from one sweet potato. Ours isn’t working so well because maybe the the sweet potato was old or we did not use enough water.

Minecraft Gardens
We continued working in groups on our mine-craft gardens. Children have had to think about the specific requirements plants need to grow...building dark spaces to plant mushrooms, allowing extra room for pumpkins, planting near water, and fertilizing to speed up growth. Here are our group gardens so far...next week we will have our final session and share our learning on seesaw.



Reading:
We continued looking at non fiction texts and began to use reading time to research our inquiry questions. We also met with the teacher and talked about our strengths and needs in reading. We made some reading goals.


Math:
This week we have been learning more about data handling. We conducted surveys on our peers and recorded our findings using tallys and bar graphs.

Taking Action:
Taking action is an important part of our education. You can take action in a variety of ways including:


This week Sovanrich and Clement took action by choosing to share their learning. Sovanrich made a pop up book at home. He spent hours illustrating and designing this and shared it with the class. His book was directly connected with our unit. Great action Sovanrich!



Clement also took action by creating a plant poster from home. This demonstrated his understanding of plants- their parts and their functions! Well done!

Community Development
We spent part of Friday afternoon doing community development. We got together as a team, started planning our grade 2 assembly, and chose activities connected to our unit. Some students went gardening with Mr Ben (transplanting the seedlings we have raised in class), others chose nature art activities or photography. Friday's are always so much fun!