BIG SCIENCE DAY

Friday, March 10 is Big Science Day here at Seisen. Students across the school-from kindergarten to high school- will participate in demonstrations, activities, and present their independent science investigations. The culminating event will be a presentation by Akiko Nakamura from Kobe University. Ms Nakamura is a well know scientist in Japan who studies the formation and evolution of planetary bodies. There is even an asteroid named after her!

Grade 5 will host its own Big Science Day for parents and elementary students on Friday morning.

Here they are getting ready.

Students will focus their independent investigations on testing the properties of matter.

Students will:
Formulate a testable question
Make a prediction using scientific language and concepts studied
Decide what variable will be tested
Decide what will be measured and recorded
Draw conclusions based on the evidence gathered
Make a connection between the experiment and real world applications

You won't want to miss this.  Doors open at 9:00. Admission is free!

Parent Sharing Session

For 2 hours on Tuesday, January 24 the fifth grade classrooms and drama room were filled with parents actively participating with their daughters in a range of learning activities. The session was split into 2 parts, the first focusing on mathematics and the second focusing on changes that occur during adolescence.  A bit more on the mathematics session:

Students broke into groups of 2 or 3 to demonstrate a mathematics concept studied in the first semester. Students led parents through an inquiry activity, stopping along the way to explain relevant concepts, algorithms, strategies, and tips to help develop the tools necessary to solve the problems. Here are a few of the inquiries students led parents through.

Here are some photos of parents and students in action

After the mathematics session wrapped up, we switched our focus to explore changes that occur during adolescence. A main goal of this session was for parents and daughters to have fun and work together to develop some strategies that could be used to maintain healthy relationships with each other during the changing years of adolescence.

Firstly, a list of 10 changes was given to each group. We asked groups to rank these changes in terms of most important, concerning, biggest, surprising, etc... Parents and daughters were able to share their perspectives with each other and talk through the changes in more detail.


Next, we role-played a few scenarios to help promote dialogue between parents and daughters. To add a bit of perspective, we had everyone switch roles; parents played the part of daughters, and daughters played the part of parents.



We finished with parents and daughters offering each others bits of advice to remember moving forward.

We want to thank everyone for taking the time to come out and share in these activities with us.  It was clear that everyone learned something and enjoyed themselves.

We look forward to our next session on March 2 when we share our science investigations with parents.

Sharing the Planet Shared Learning

Thank you to everyone who came to our grade 5 and 6 shared learning session.
Here are a few pictures from the afternoon.