Greetings!

Grade 6 began this week with presentations based upon research into different types of herbs. They created posters to help share their research and then presented these to the rest of the class on Monday morning. I was impressed by their loud speaking voices, as well as their confidence in presenting. Their posters were also well designed and easy to understand. Good work everyone!

This week was filled with outside exploration and experiments. They started a honeybee artwork to be involved in an art competition run by the Asahi Student Newspaper company. The aim of this competition is to spread awareness of the importance of bees for our environment. We went outside with our paints and boards and students created their artwork while observing the bees in our environment.

We also visited our farm to observe how our plants are growing. The grade 6 students concluded that they need to water the plants a bit more constantly so that they can grow more. One of the students also stated that they need to take the weeds out so the soil can give nutrients to the plants they are growing and not the weeds.

Another thing we did this week was observing pollen with the microscopes. Students went outside to collect pollen on a piece of tape, which we later stuck on the slides. We used these slides to observe what they look like magnified. The students really enjoyed learning how to use a microscope and was interested by the things they observed through it. Different pollen and flowers did not look the same, which was very interesting.

Additionally, we watched a video about the similarities and differences of an animal and plant cell. Students took notes on the information that was shared with them and then drew a diagram of each cell. This was used to make the plant and animal cells come to life. With grade 5, they created a real life diagram of the structure of each cell. They used food to represent each part of the cell. The learning intention of this activity was for students to understand there are 2 types of eukaryotic cells (plant and animal) and that they have similar and different parts of the cells for different reasons.

On Thursday, we had some lovely little visitors from the Minami and Shimauchi campuses. The grade 5 and 6 students made bookmarks using flowers and leaves they got exploring the outside environment with the preschoolers. It was very nice to see the older students looking after the younger students and helping them create their bookmarks. At the end they gave the younger students some letters they have written to wish them good luck for next year when they become primary school students!

This week was super eventful! I hope everyone has a nice rest and have a good weekend! See you next week. 😀