Tracking Rain

We are putting on our meteorologist hats and starting our Weather unit in Science! 

Last week, we had to track the forecast and actual rainfall for three days at home. Ms Elder couldn't have chosen a better week because we ended up with a record amount of rainfall on Thursday! 

This learning task was a great discussion-started about the accuracy of scientific experiments. We knew that we couldn't accurately compare our data because there were so many uncontrolled factors. Below are all of the ones we brainstormed. We also discussed why we might get different results even if we controlled for these factors.

The official Weather stats for Calgary documented 33.3 mm of rain for Thursday. That breaks the record from the past 100 years. In 1948, Calgary received 30 mm of rain.  

We also took the opportunity to talk about water safety. Our rivers swell when we get that much rain and there was flooding in parts of the city. Firefighters were warning Calgarians to stay away from the edge of the river, avoid going into pathway underpasses, and not to raft. 

We will be studying clouds next!

Probability Experiments

Last week our Grade 5 students were engaged in work on Probability. As a follow-up to some work we did earlier in the year in class, we created games of chance to assess their probability outcomes. We are working on using language like “certain, likely, unlikely, and impossible.”

Check out some of the games we made:

These spinners show that yellow is "likely" to be spun, green and red are "unlikely" and green and red are "equally likely." Blue is "impossible."

This spinner shows that green and red are "unlikely" and "equally likely" and blue is "very unlikely."

When picking these marbles, light blue would be "very unlikely," yellow and purple are "equally likely," and dark blue is "unlikely." Red is "impossible."

We can also express Probability in fractions. This is something we'll be working on in June.

Building a Vehicle that Moves

Throughout April we have been working on a building project for Science. Our task was to design and build a vehicle that moves from a force such as elastic, wind, spring, or inflated balloon. We could not push it ourselves or use gravity.

The focus of the project was evaluating different designs scientifically, and being able to make changes to improve the distance our vehicles travelled. Measurement was the tie to Math.

Some students made cars. Some even chose to make a boat, a plane, or a hot air balloon! Here are some photos of the different vehicles we made: