Most of Grade 4 has never seen Alberta so to help them visualize what the province looks like, students made topographical maps of Alberta. Groups used their research about the natural regions along with information from our Social Studies textbook to recreate Alberta's features, including their vegetation, animals, landforms, and bodies of water. 4KE could see how diverse Alberta is, including deserts, forests, and mountains. It was a thorough but rewarding project!
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While we learned about the natural regions of Alberta in Social Studies, 4KE became familiar with a very common tree in Alberta, the aspen tree. Inspired by Albertan artist Melissa McKinnon, we painted our own version of aspen trees. It was quite the process as students learned about foreground, middleground and background, and recreated the three through different sizes of trees and a colourful sky. Students made the trees using a relief technique, and leaves by dotting paint with cotton buds. Please check out some of the process below! The results were simply beautiful. To prepare for their next writing project, students learned how to find reliable websites on the internet. Prior to this lesson, students had been using websites found by me or offered through the school's library links. Now, students have learned how to evaluate websites based on the author, content, and how current they are. Small groups were given a website to evaluate, deciding whether they were reliable or unreliable. We found that most of them were reliable but a few tricky ones were planted, including websites about the Jackalope and Tree Octopus! Students had fun looking at the fake websites but also learned why it was so important to not trust every website just because it looked nice or had realistic photographs and writing.
As our last simple machine before the CNY break, students learned about levers. They made simple levers, learning about the 3 main parts: the load, fulcrum, and force. By working with different lever designs, they learned about the concept of mechanical advantage and how the amount of force applied is affected by where the load is in relation to the lever's fulcrum. They then made catapults, adding the concept of potential and kinetic energy to their understanding of levers. |
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