Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Snow Survey

We have learned that in some places in the world, it can snow so much that schools are closed. Poor them, missing out on school! We thought it might be interesting to see how many children in our school have been in snow. It never, ever snows where we live, so the only way for anyone to see it is to travel somewhere else far away.

To do our survey, we were going to work in groups and go to one classroom each. But first, we had to work out what we wanted to ask. We had to make sure that we phrased the question just right, so we'd get information that was as accurate as possible. We decided that a good question would be "Have you ever made a snowball with real snow?" We figured that if a kid had been in snow they would definitely have made a snowball! We had to say "real snow" because Mrs N said that when she was little, she used to scrape ice out of the freezer and make snowballs, but that isn't real snow of course!

Once we had our question organised, we needed to work out what we were going to say when we went to each classroom to do our survey. We wrote a script together, as a class, and then one person from each group copied it off the whiteboard so they'd know what to say to the classroom teacher. We had to ask them if it was alright for us to speak to their class. They all said yes.

When we got back to class, we made pictographs with the information we gathered. We used a picture of a snowman to represent each student. We had to do a lot of counting and re-counting to make sure we had just the right amount on our graphs. We found out that all of the class pictographs showed that most children had never seen snow.

Tomorrow, we're going to put all that information together and make a whole school pictograph. It might be hard to fit that many snowmen onto a graph, so we might have to think of a way to not use as many, but still keep our information accurate.

Today is Ash Wednesday, which is the first day of Lent. We went to Mass and we thought of some Lenten promises that we could try to keep between now and Easter.

We were excited to see that our Lunch Exchange friends put up some photos of some of their lunches. It was the very, very end of the day when we saw them, so we didn't get a chance to have a good look, but we will first thing tomorrow!

Love from The Smarties

3 comments:

  1. Hi Mrs. N and the Smarties!
    It looks like school is so much fun! You are doing such great activities. We're group of students from our school's music class in America, and we really like your blog. We even decided to make our own!

    We think it's really funny and interesting that you use the word "minibeast" because we don't call them that here.

    Also, it snowed yesterday here! We could barely see across our soccer field! It's sad that we miss school, but we DO get to go skiing and snowmobiling when we have snow days. We love that around here.

    Keep up the good work, Smarties!

    Sincerely,
    The Rowdy Rockers

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  2. Hi there Smarties! We are a group of Grade 1 students in British Columbia, Canada. We usually get snow here, but this year we only had one snowfall, early in December. It is sunny here now and while it still drops down to 0 or 1 degree at night, it has been about 12 degrees C. here during the day. We like the fact that we don't need coats now when we play outside! We live near the ocean, and we have the warmest average temperature in all of Canada. What do you like to do at recess time? Lots of us like to skip, or make up games that we play in our forts in the trees on our playground. Some of us play soccer or road hockey.
    Keep on writing!
    From Mrs. Nessman's class

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  3. Dear The Smarties,

    You've worked very hard doing your survey!!! Your teaches must be proud of you. Keep it up!

    Your Russian friends

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