Monday, May 13, 2013

Even though it is very late on Monday night, I wanted to add a few things about what we have been doing.

In Geography, we have started looking more closely at the location of places on maps.  In order to make a curriculum connection, we are also looking a coordinate points on a Cartesian graph.  Here is an image of that graph:

For now, we will be looking at the section, or quadrant, that is in the upper-right part.  You will notice that all of the yellow dots have coordinates.  Some have a "-" in front of them to indicate that they are negative numbers.  We will learn about this, but not at the moment.

From this part in Math, we will then be looking at locating some areas on a map using longitude and latitude.  To help us prepare for this, along with reviewing some locations on the grid, we played a few Math games.  One was called High Five.  It involved using dice to locate a point on the grid and then a race to see who could complete the tower of five cubes.  Here are some images from our play:

Today, or technically yesterday, a small group of 10 students ventured off to the University of Toronto to make SLIME!  The experiment was based on introducing what a Polymer is to the class.  On a very small, micro level, Polymers are repeated structural units (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymer).
To demonstrate this, the facilitators had the students join arms and parade through the room:

When it came time to working with the materials, the students used this recipe, supplied by the University of Toronto presenters (they are Science students at the university):

The following images are of the various activities we did to test out the slime the group made:

There is no homework tonight.