The students in grade four have been reading a new book, The City of Ember, by Jeanne DuPrau. The book tells the story of a city without natural light that is threatened by an aging infrastructure and rapidly diminishing supplies. The book offers a variety of wonderful opportunities to connect to our science unit: Building Devices and Vehicles That Move. The students played the role of one of the jobs in the book, Pipeworks Laborer, and worked collaboratively to design a pipe system that could carry water from one place to another. This met the learning outcome: Use simple forces to power or propel a device such as moving water downhill.
Despite the rain, the grade fours had a fantastic time on our field trip to Heritage Park. It was wonderful to experience all of our learning in Social Studies first hand. We sheltered from the rain in a tipi, felt beaver pelts as we learned about the fur trade and rode a train like the ones that helped to make settlement in the West possible. Seeing the first settler homes, the "soddies", homes that housed families with sixteen children and sandstone buildings helped the students to better understand what life was like for early settlers. Most are happy that they are able to go to a school with hundreds of students and one grade per classroom rather than a one room schoolhouse of the past!
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