Mr. Quinlan's Great Grade 3's

Click on the link below and find out about Flat Mike’s journey.

Here is the link –  Where has Flat Mike been

Earlier this week, all the third grade classes were treated to a special viewing of “The Big Blue Planet”, focusing on coral reefs and the interdependence of living things that lurk beneath the surface of the water. It has been a focus for discussion as we have embarked on our unit on “Biodiversity”. As a follow-up to the video, we put together a little Powerpoint quiz. The kids have completed this fun reinforcement activity at school, but would now like to see how much their parents know about the amazing marine world that surrounds us.

As well, Mr. Quinlan and Mrs. McGrath found a highly entertaining way to demonstrate how humans are destroying the marine environment with waste and other pollutants.

Please leave the students a coment or two! Enjoy!!!

Over the  last week the students of Timbuk Q have been making commercials with imovie for our Energy Unit. These commercials were made in response to our fictitious town losing it main source of power. Groups of students analyzed the following map and came up with ideas, pictures and a “convincing script” to make a commercial to convince the towns people that their energy source would be the best choice for their town. The commercials are here for you to enjoy and comment on.

Today we went on a quick field trip to MERALCO to see just where our power in Manila comes from. The classes were able to learn about some of the ‘electrical” history of the company and how it has been operating in Manila. They were also able to get a better look at a generator, turbine and what 500,000 volts of electricity looks like. Here are a few pictures. Please talk to your child about what they learned on this outing and how it is helping them to understand more about our Energy unit.

 showed a few “math songs” to the students today to help them remeber some of the topics we had covered and to also keep the new concepts fresh. Check out the You Tube links to see what we’ve been learning.I

Today, our class learned all about hydropower with Mr. O’Neel.  Brainstorming what hydropower means was tough but everyone had great ideas.  Ask your child if they can tell you more about hydropower.  Then, everyone took part in two different exciting activities.  The first one they tried to see how far they could get a marble rolling using angles and a ramp.  The connection to water flowing in a dam was quickly made.  For the second activity they created a waterwheel and used the power of water to raise a ping pong ball attached to a piece of string.  Check out some of these cool videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDgGvPdAuTU&feature=fvw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-4Ll_v32RY

http://www.juliantrubin.com/encyclopedia/renewable_energy/hydroelectricity.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEL7yc8R42k

Renewable or Non-Renewable: that is the question….that kicks off a packed session of exploring non-renewable fossil fuels.  After brainstorming meaning and classifying energy sources, students quickly get down to the nitty gritty of fossil fuels.  Students see non-renewable resources in action as we use ‘energy’ (baking powder and vinegar) to light up a light bulb (yellow balloon) to understand how fossil fuels are not renewable. Giggling abounds as we learn that coal, oil and natural gas are a product of fossilized animals and plants from thousands of years ago.  We learn about the process of finding coal, oil and natural gas and explore this concept in a fun scavenger hunt and graphing activity where we find different fossil fuels found around the room and graph our results, learning that as we use fossil fuel there are less resources to be found. Our graphs expertly showed the dwindling numbers. As our search for fossil fuels continues there are increasing consequences. Most recently there was an oils spill that has negatively impacted the environment. When exploring the cons of fossil fuels, students experimented with different sorbents to clean up an oil spill to find effective and ineffective qualities of each.

Enjoy a glimpse into this session by looking at the ‘prezi’ that guided our work: http://prezi.com/k9moaevres6i/fossil-fartsi-mean-fuel/