Grade 4

It was amazing to think of the technology that can allow a car to drive down a street with no driver.  This is the way the world's vehicles are moving into the future, and it takes a lot of programming skills!  ELA is Canada's first autonomous (driverless) vehicle that the public is allowed to go onto.  We learned about this technology and its good and not-so-good parts.  We had a special guest speaker, engineer Rod Schebesch from Stantec Engineering.  He and his company were part of making the ELA testing happen in Calgary.  After that, we walked to Telus Spark and the Zoo, to catch a ride!  It was short, and safe.  ELA is also an electric vehicle, and uses no gasoline, so there's no pollution from the exhaust.    

Making Crab Apple (or Crabapple) Jelly was a great time!  There were many steps.  First we gathered donations of apples / crab apples, but we needed to get some more.  Some of the donated ones were rotten because we didn't have enough refrigerator storage space.  We went on a field study to find an pick apples around the neighbourhood. Then we prepared the apples by cutting out any bruised or rotten bits (sometimes just getting rid of the whole apple), and taking off the stem.  For larger apples, we cut out the core. We boiled the apples in some very large pans of hot water, and put them through a sieving system with some cheesecloth.  This drained overnight. The next day, we had a parent volunteer help us.  Thanks so much to Kirsten!  We had delicious juice, but now needed to boil it, stir in a whole lot of sugar, a bit of lemon juice and some pectin to help it set.  All our jars had to be boiled so that the jelly could last for a longer time in the jars without going mouldy.

September 14th, 2018

On September 13th, grade four students spent the day at the Bow Valley Ranche in Fish Creek Park. 'Ranche' in 'Bow Valley Ranche' has an 'e' on it because it is British.  We learned about Alberta's history, land, and stories. One of the highlights was getting to go into a tipi and making our own miniature tipi using traditional methods.  We also explored nature by doing a scavenger hunt around the Bow Valley Ranche area of Fish Creek Park, looking for plants.  There were a few questions we had after our field study:  How can people reach that high to tie up the tipis at the top, and how do they make the tipi stable? How did they find big, long tree branches and prepare them to be the right shape for poles? What do they use as paint for the stories on the tipi?  This group stopped to observe a hawk perched on a high tree branch.  We were exploring the wilderness area for plants and animals.  Aazlynn was observing a choke