April Newsletter and Calendar are up on the blog! Click the link to the right to see them.

I can’t believe the last week of March is already here!

• Today the students are each bringing home a little coleus plant – these are from Gardenscape. They grow quickly so you will need to transplant them in the next week or two.
• A pink survey note is being sent home today. Please fill it out and return it to school this week.
• An April calendar and newsletter will be up on the blog this week.
• We started building our straw towers today! We will continue to work on these on Tuesday and Wednesday. Our goals are to have them be taller than one meter and to make sure they are stable enough to stand for at least 24 hours! Here we are in the early stages:

Have a great week!

Well, we had a disappointing morning for our class! We attempted to head to Saskatoon for our field trip, only to have to turn around and head back to school because of some very icy highways! So, here we are in our replacement “field trip”, having a movie afternoon in the classroom 🙂

Tomorrow (Tuesday) is World Down’s Syndrome Day! To show our support, we will be wearing mismatched socks! I forgot to remind the students today so hopefully you all see this message before Tuesday!

While we’re all excited that spring weather is here, our playground is not so happy… it’s officially the WES lake again!

PLEASE send rubber boots for your child to wear, as well as spare socks (and pants, if you think your child will need them). We had many wet children today, and I’m assuming we will have more wet children all week! (Our school rule is to have studetns stay out of the puddles, but we all know how well that works…)

Here’s what the playground/field looked like today:

This week we built 2-storey structures using toothpicks and marshmallows. After they were built, we tested them out to see which ones would be earthquake-proof, using our “Earthquake Simulator” (aka a tray of jello!) Here are our results! We learned a lot about how to make structures more stable, even when we had to use non-traditional materials. We will use this new knowledge when we build our straw towers!

We’ve been learning how to make structures more stable, so we tested the strength of 3 different kinds of paper. We made cylinders using regular computer paper (which I forgot to take a picture of!), blue construction paper, and white cardstock paper. Then we tested the strength of each cylinder by seeing how many textbooks we could stack on each paper cylinder! We were amazed by how many each cylinder could hold! Each cylinder is only ONE sheet of paper!

Yesterday Ms. Mayes taught us about Fire Safety. We talked about safety rules and how to be fire safe, and then she showed us what three things fires need in order to burn. Ask me if I remember the three things fire needs!

On Tuesday, Ms. Mayes led an experiment for us. We were trying to figure out which shape is the strongest shape. We built cubes, rectangular prisms, and pyramids. We tested the strength of each by seeing how many pennies each structure could hold. Ask me what the strongest shape is!

We started learning about planting last week! We are fortunate that we had some grade 11 science students join us from the high school. They were here to help us plant some marigold seeds. We also learned about the parts of a plant, and what each part’s purpose is. We can’t wait to see our seeds sprout! A few of them are already up! Once the plants are big enough they will be transferred to the greenhouse at the high school. We will be visiting the greenhouse later this spring!