Science
Yesterday was only the eighth day of science, and we have gotten off to a quick start!
Our first project was to make observations about three different mystery seeds, record those observations in newly decorated science notebooks and follow a series of written directions to plant the seeds. Most have predicted poppy seed, amaranth and some type of citrus for the seed types. The exciting news is that at least two types of the mystery seeds have sprouted! Students recorded observations of the first sprouts this past Monday including practicing using cm and mm to measure sprout height.
We worked together to analyze the compiled beach cleanup data from the whole school (more about results on the 5th/6th blog). The third and fourth graders were especially challenged by the massive numbers we divided (using calculators) to figure out the average number of pieces of trash picked up by each person participating in the Orchard School cleanup compared to the average number of pieces of trash picked up by each person participating in California during the 2015 International Coastal Cleanup (ICC). Spoiler alert! Orchard students picked up more pieces per person but the average weight of those pieces was significantly heavier during the ICC.
Students had their first engineering challenge - building a bridge that spans 12 inches made of only 25 popsicle sticks, 4 binder clips and no more than 4ft of masking tape. As you can see, all bridges held at least a notebook or two and many were able to withstand quite a bit of weight.
