We love to experiment with holiday treats around here and Easter was no different. We had a lot of fun with Peeps. We first read an informational piece about the history of Peeps and watched a video of how they are made.
Then, we experimented with putting Peeps in different liquids to see what would happen. We made predictions and tested in water, clear soda, and vinegar. After leaving them over the weekend, the vinegar Peep had completely disintegrated. Soda was the second most disintegrated, followed by water.
We also put two different colored Peeps in clear soda and watched the colors mix!
Of course we then had to put the Peeps in the microwave, 'cause that's how we roll!! The Peeps expanded to at least three times their size!
Our Natural Disasters Unit if one of the units that I look most forward to each year! The students worked with a group to complete research on a natural disaster of their choice. After completing the research, each group wrote a script for a news report that they would film using a green screen iPad app called Veescope Live! Each group chose a weather map image and a video clip of their natural disaster to be inserted in place of the green screen.
Each news report had to inform viewers about the following:
-Name
-Place the disaster is likely to occur
-Description of the disaster
-How it forms
-How it is measured
-Effects of the disaster
-Most devastating disaster of it's type in history
After filming, the groups then had to piece their recordings together and edit the final product using Movie Maker:
Pardon the interruption, but we have Breaking News!!
We celebrated St. Patrick's Day by studying St. Patrick and learning a lot about the country of Ireland. We also explored Irish Folktales and of course leprechauns! The book Mary McClean and the St. Patrick's Day Parade even taught us about the Great Potato Famine and Irish Immigration to New York.
The Twosies created a slide show about St. Patrick. You can check it out using the link below!
St. Patrick Presentation
Because we love to celebrate holidays with STEM Challenges, we conducted one with a leprechaun theme. The Twosies had to design a parachute that would safely deliver a leprechaun from the top of a rainbow.
These teams were the most successful!
Ayden and Ashton's parachute stayed in the air for a record-breaking 3.77 seconds!!!
Britton's and Gabriella's parachute was the most consistent, staying around 3 seconds for each of it's three trials!
The Twosies have truly learned so much throughout our Plant Unit!
We spent several days collecting data on hours of sunlight for our greenhouse location. We collected data on three different areas and then learned how to create tables in Google Docs to share our data. We met with Dr. Stancil and presented our data and suggestions for our greenhouse location.
We learned all about how seeds move from one place to another. Air, water, animals, and humans play a very important role in distributing seeds. Some seeds are even specially designed to travel. Here the Twosies explore with models of seed dispersal. The seeds they tested were gliders, rotocopters, and spinners.:
Next we explored how seeds are made through pollination. The Twosies made models of pollinators and explored how the mixing of pollen allows for seed production:
They also tried their hand at programming and demonstrated pollination through the app Scratch Jr.!
Finally the Twosies learned all about how the seed turns in to a plant through the the study of plant life cycles and planting our own plants.
The following links will take you to their Plant Life Cycle Thing Link:
