Mr. MacLachlan's Class Blog

Familiarize yourself with the following picture and copy it into your Science notebooks

Hello everyone! Welcome to the beginning of the second semester. I hope you’ve enjoyed a restful holiday either here or abroad.

We have progressed enormously in the first half of the year and I am looking forward to the coming weeks and months. Science will see us starting a more biological area of study (worms!!!) and Math will be starting into Geometry. Part of our Science work will involve feeding the worms various Worm Food. Please take a look so that you remember what to bring.

Our focus for the first half of semester 2 will be Form and function and to get you thinking about this, I will leave you with this question:

Does form determine function or does function determine form?

…Semesters that is. It’s been a very packed end to the semester and I’m hoping that everyone walked away feeling more confident in all of the areas covered. I hope that everyone enjoys the break and comes back refreshed and reinvigorated for the fun of the next semester.

Looking forward to seeing everyone again in January. Have wonderful break and if you’re travelling, please do so safely.

Mr MacLachlan

What an exciting beginning to our second quarter. In Science, we have started to look at minerals and crystals. We have been discovering their various different properties as well as their similarities. In Math, we are about to dive into Order of Operations head first. Hold your breath…

A quick question to go out on…

While we were sorting out minerals in the lab, the magnetite sample was mixed in with a huge bag of hornblende. How can I go about separating the magnetite from the hornblende in the easiest possible way?

All pictures sourced from geology.com

This week will close with a bang which will resound throughout the ISM Grade 5 hallways. Classrooms Without Walls will kick off tomorrow morning with an orientation followed by The Amazing Race. We are looking forward to seeing the eager Grade 5 faces all wearing their PE clothes.

The following week will be the first Math Science performance task of the year. It will cover both subject areas and will take approximately two days to work through. Practise with the Scientific Method is crucial at this point. Look over your previous investigations and don’t forget to refer to your rubric when designing your investigations!

Enjoy and Good luck!

My apologies, I have fallen a bit behind in my blog postings.

The last few weeks have been eventful and, of course, educational.

Math has involved many new and challenging concepts. Place value, prime numbers, factors and factor trees and rounding to name a few. Everyone is slowly becoming more confident and capable with the terms with noticeable improvements being seen.

Science has been no less challenging but very focused on a specific, extremely important area of Science; the Scientific Process. Together we are learning about designing, documenting and carrying out investigations in a way that could be easily replicated by others in order to check our results. 

Key vocabulary:

Aim, Hypothesis, Procedure (Materials and Method), Evidence (Tables and graphs), Conclusion and Evaluation

Each part of the Scientific process is important and great care must be taken in their design.

A quick posting for everyone’s information:

In Science this quarter students will be designing and conducting investigations using the Scientific Method. These skills will continue to develop throughout the year.

• Writing Aims and Hypotheses
• Drawing and labeling diagrams using leaders and labels
• Writing a bulleted list of materials that will be used
• Writing a detailed procedure
• Collecting data
• Organizing data into a table
• Creating scale appropriate graphs (bar, line and line plot)
• Understanding and interpreting data
• Writing conclusions using the evidence collected
• Writing evaluations that are specific to the investigation

In Math this quarter students will be learning the concepts below.

• Number Sense- arrays, prime/composite numbers, factors, factor trees, square numbers,
• Place value- whole numbers and decimals
• Rounding – whole numbers and decimals
• Addition/subtraction/multiplication/division word problems
• Estimating answers before calculating

• Converting units of measurement
• Choosing and using appropriate tools to measure
• Accurately drawing given measurements
• Estimating and measuring accurately

Hopefully this will give you a clearer idea of where we are going/what we are doing. Have a wonderful long weekend everyone!

In class, we have been discussing safety in Science and scientists. Everyone drew a picture of what they thought a scientist looked like. Here are some examples.

It has been a positive start to the 2011-2012 school year. There were a lot of nerves and excitement and it will take some time to get settled. However, everyone has done well so far. Our big project of the first day was to come up with some basic rules for how we will interact with each other and the educational environment in the best possible way. Our classroom essential agreements were:

If we are all able to stick to these agreements, the year is sure to continue in just as positive a way as it has started.