High Park Through the Seasons

Our trip to High Park on Friday was awesome!
We loved the subway ride (the front car is so entertaining!)

Our program was called "Tracks and Trails" . We learned to be detectives, looking for evidence of animals in the park.
We were taught to look for:

Scat
Animal Homes
Body Parts ( feathers, fur)
Tracks
Sounds
Food Clues

We practiced moving like animals:

We made our own tracks:

And scat:

And we matched some animal evidence to pictures of animals:

Then we went outside to be detectives,

where we found real tracks:

And food evidence:

One group found a beautiful red-tailed hawk feather, and we saw a rare red squirrel! We saw some animal homes ( burrows, nests, logs), but the only scat we saw was dog scat. We heard the sounds of many birds ( chickadees, cardinals, and woodpeckers), as well as some chattering squirrels.

We also stood on top on top of the snake hibernaculum ( we were told that hundreds of snakes might be below us, all tangled together for the winter:

That reminds me! Before we went outside, we had a visit from the Nature Center's resident snake, Snappy, who is a corn snake. Snappy is not a poisonous snake. She is a constrictor! We couldn't touch her, but we were very excited to watch her twist and turn and wrap herself around one of our instructor's arm.

It was a wonderful day. Although the weather was deceptively cold, the rain held off for us, and we had a great time. Thank you SO MUCH to our parent volunteers. B's Dad, R's Dad, G's Mom, and E's Mom. We could not have done it without you all.

Energy in Our Lives

We have been learning about how energy makes things happen!
We have investigated what the sun does for us ( gives us light, heat, solar power and makes things grow :)
We investigated sound energy, heat energy and light energy.
We investigated how energy makes different things move.
We took a tour of the school and saw how we use energy in many different ways.

We also saw how powerful the sun can be. It changed the colour of our paper! We also remembered how the sun can change the colour of our skin -- and that the sun could hurt us so we should wear sunscreen, sunglasses and sunscreen when we are out I need the sun for long periods. Even in the winter! ( because the sun changed the clout of our papers in the winter!)

After learning about energy, we learned that some sources of energy are renewable, and that some can be all used up. We discussed what WE can do to reduce our use of energy, and reduce our impact on the environment.

Text to Text connections

We have learned how to compare different texts.
Here, we compared 3 different versions of Jack and. The Beanstalk. We were very familiar with using a venn diagram to compare two different ideas, but using three circles made it even more challenging!

In Media Literacy, the class has been comparing stories in print to a video version of the story. I was very proud of the class when Ms. Tirkos told me that they were experts at comparing things!