Recharging our Learning Battery with Brain Breaks

 To help us be ready for learning, we are practising how to notice when we need to brain break to help boost our  Zest, Positive Emotions and focus. This week we used the Zones of Regulation to help us notice when we are away from the Green Zone which is the optimal learning zone. It can happen during the day, also our moods and needs can vary form day to day. It's important to develop strategies to help us get back into the Green Zone so we brainstormed some ideas that will help our brain have a quick recharging break of no more than 10 minutes. 

We made a bank of ideas that we can use during the day:

Some of these ideas are: climbing a tree, spending a few minutes at my favourite place in the school, going for quick run or kicking a ball, doing a quick drawing or having a drink of water or a quick snack.

Here we are practising our brain breaks to see if they can give a boost. Most of them were just what we needed to get some oxygen, positive emotions and help us to refocus on more learning! Do you have a brain break strategy that helps you to recharge?

Inquiry- The Power of Sound

 This term we will be investigating sound and music. Sound is a very interesting phenomena because it's invisible but we know it's there! What is sound? How do we hear sound? How do instruments make sound? These are some of the questions that will drive our inquiry this term.

We started our inquiry by collecting what we already about what we think we know about sound. After that we did a science experiment to test how sound travels through different materials. We tested what tapping sounds like when we hear it through the air and what tapping sounds like when we hear it through different materials, like a table. 

We are collecting the results of our experiments in charts.

Doing an experiment helped to prompt lots of new questions that we will look into over the coming weeks to expand our understanding of sound.

Investigating Symmetry

For maths this week we've enjoyed looking at wonderful maths patterns we can make that show different types of symmetry. We've used Creativity in different ways to make beautiful patterns that show how shapes repeat themselves and it has been lots of fun.

We made snow flakes to show reflection symmetry and looked at how shapes can have symmetry in them.

Some of us had a go at using reflection and rotational symmetry to create colourful patterns like flowers. We tried rotating patterns and reflecting them.

We created some symmetry art from our investigations