Rock Sculptures

We studied the rock sculpture artist, Michael Grab.

He has a website called Gravity Glue.  (Click on the words Gravity Glue to see his website.)  We watched a video of him building one of these amazing balanced creations while sitting right in the river.

As we watched this video, we brainstormed a list of traits that he needed to have in order to create rock sculptures like this.  We came up with this list:

Kavion's grandma and grandpa provided us with lots of rocks to try these sculptures out for ourselves.

We headed outside with our minds ready.

We started out small...

...but we didn't give up.  Look at the focus!

Some of us collaborated to build structures with more rocks.

Some of us decided to continue working alone.

We had some pretty cool structures!

Watch this video if you'd like to see the focus, determination, and "Gravity Glue" of Room 408!

Human Sundials

We needed a sunny day (all day!) to do our Human Sundial experiment.  Sunny Wisconsin days in May are hard to come by!  We finally got one and headed outside every few hours to record our shadows and observe how they change throughout the day.

We started at 8:30am by marking our positions on the ground.

Next, we outlined our shadows.

Then we measured how many fists high the sun was in the sky.

Finally, we measured the length of our shadows with rulers.

We knew how many rulers (how many feet) it took to measure our shadow...

...but we were supposed to measure our shadows in inches...

...we really had to work our brains to add 12 + 12 + 12 + 12 + 12 + 12 + 12...

...such focus and concentration!

When we went out two hours later at 10:30, we were amazed by the changes!  We noticed our shadows were all "slanty!"

 We were also shorter!  (This was pretty funny.)

When we went out at 12:30 we found out that our shadows had changed again...they were now even shorter and went out to the side!

The sun was so many fists high in the sky!

So far we had some pretty cool observations.

We went out at 2:30.  Our shadows looked kind of like they did at 10:30 but they were further away.

The sun was going down in the sky.

Some of us couldn't see our shadows anymore.  Poor Bennett!

We figured out that Bennett's work area was now in the school's shadow!

It was a great day of learning about Light & Sound!

Immersing Ourselves in Sound & Light

One way to get our brains thinking and observing is by immersing ourselves in real examples of sound and light.

We have already discovered things like how we can feel sound vibrations and how we can make light behave in different ways, like reflect it with mirrors or change it with colored filters.

Here are some cool videos about sound and light that we observed.

Today's new learning becomes our new schema!

Sound & Light Schema

Before we start a big inquiry, it's so interesting to think about our schema (what we think we know).  We drew our Light & Sound schema and posted it on our learning clipboards.  Here are a few examples of our schema about light and sound.
Look closely.  You can see how they already are trying to represent what light and sound would look like if we could see it.

Learning about our schema helps me focus our inquiry.  It's interesting how first grade minds work!