Student Guest Bloggers from grade 9 As a way to create an audience for their work, recently the grade 9 classes have begun blogging. As part of this process, students were asked to recount an experience they had during their week long adventure at Bamfield Marine Centre on the west coast of Vancouver Island. Here… Continue reading Student Blogs "The Bamfield Diaries"
-by Denise Kitagawa (Guest Parent Blogger) Earlier this month I had the privilege and pleasure of accompanying fifty grade 7 students from the Calgary Science School as they headed into the field to collect some baseline observations prior to the reintroduction of beavers to the Pine Creek watershed at the Ann and Sandy Cross Conservation… Continue reading Bringing Beavers Back to the Cross Conservation Area – Grade 7 Interactions and Ecosystems Field Study
-by Greg Neil, Grade 5 Math/Science Editors note: Greg’s classroom was just featured on Canadian Geographic’s the Energy Diet Challenge. One of Greg’s students recently wrote a letter to the editor of the Calgary Herald. To read that letter, click here. As a science teacher at the Calgary Science School, I am always looking for… Continue reading Learning Off the Grid! The beginning…
by Deirdre Bailey and Amy Park It began with a conversation on how best to develop deep understanding of biological cycles. When we considered simply slicing fruit and vegetables in half and leaving them out in the open to observe the resulting changes, we never anticipated the smells, the new life, or the learning that… Continue reading Students into Scientists
by Deirdre Bailey and Amy Park Our Grade 4 classes have spent the past three months inquiring into the topic of “Waste and Our World” with the goal of developing an appreciation and understanding of their roles and responsibilities as global citizens of this environmentally fragile and increasingly endangered planet. We had hoped that our… Continue reading Inquiring into Waste and Our World
by Deirdre Bailey Today was amazing for a number of reasons. We finished our decomposition lab this morning. It had been an enlightening few weeks of learning what becomes of a perishable food, halved and left in the open for three weeks. Some awesome things happen to rotting fruit after it starts to smell, not… Continue reading These Kids Get It!
On Nov 7-10, the Calgary Science School sent a team to the ACEE Environmental Leadership Clinic, funded by Cenovus Energy and Environment Canada’s Eco-Action Community Fund. This Clinic provided our team with an opportunity to network with other Environmental Educators and stakeholders in Alberta. As a CSS team, we focused on developing a plan to… Continue reading Focusing on Outdoor and Environmental Education
Recently we shared some posts about a grade 6 math problem built around the question: Are there enough trees in Canada’s Boreal Forest to be considered the lungs of the Earth? In order to solve this problem, students were given a few pieces of background information and worked in small groups to formulate the specific… Continue reading Boreal Math Part 2
Our grade 6 students have recently finished wrestling with the math problem: “Are there enough trees in Canada’s Boreal Forest to be the lungs of the earth?” The question came from research that one of the Grade 6 teachers, Erin Couillard, found which stated that the northern boreal forest now produces more oxygen than any… Continue reading Boreal Math: Final Thoughts
Our grade 6 teachers are in the planning stages for a unit on the Boreal Forest. The guiding question for the study is currently: How is the Boreal Forest related to the health of the planet? Students will work through two sections of the study: 1. A mathematical exploration of large numbers, connected to the… Continue reading Boreal Forest: Are we doing enough?
