Healthy Foods From Healthy Soils  April 23 - May 22, 2012

All Soule and Harraseeket third graders are now participating in this unit.  It involves myself, Mr. McKibben and Ms. Pearson too.  We are focusing on what specific environmental and biological components are necessary to provide healthy food and water for all.  

A major aspect of this unit is our collaboration with Wolfe's Neck Farm where we will be spending an entire week.  There, we will work with the animals, help plant, learn about composting, and about nutrition, and many other topics.  Also, in conjunction with the Freeport Historical Society, students will be creating 15+ scarecrows to be donated to the farm, to the Historical Society's Pettingill Farm and to Mast Landing School.  When we return to school in September, some scarecrows will still be at work in our school gardens protecting our plants.

Kitchen Chemistry March 19 - April 12, 2012

Our kitchen cabinet and the many common items found in it constituted the framework for this unit's focus on how matter behaves. Using everyday household substances, students learned about the properties of matter, physical changes, chemical changes, atoms, molecules, and reactions.

Is turning cream, sugar and vanilla into yummy ice cream a physical or chemical change? The students discussed this matter while munching on their own homemade ice cream. How about making pancakes? In our own "Chemical Change Cafe", students pondered the evidence for which kind of change occurs to make pancakes while the pancakes were cooking on the griddle. What about the maple syrup? Did the sliced strawberries that went on top undergo a chemical or physical change? These were among the hot topics that the class explored.

Chocolate chip cookies provided the centerpiece for a discussion on conservation of matter, while a whole host of substances found in the kitchen were used to understand the what acids and bases are.

This unit was a fun and tasty introduction to the amazing world of chemistry.