Animals in winter and Rocks and Rings!

Today in Science, we talked a lot about how animals survive in the winter.  They have to avoid freezing and starving to death.  We learned that they have three main strategies to survive: 

-Migration

-Hibernation 

-Adaptation

Today we focused on Adaptation.  Look the animals above and have your child tell you what some of these animals do to help them stay around in wintery locations and survive.  

Some of their strategies:

-Gathering and storing food for winter

-Eating lots during summer/fall and storing energy as blubber/fat for winter

-Having warm fur, feathers or wool to insulate their bodies

-Having extra feathers/fur on feet to help walk on snow

-Having big feet to walk on the snow (like snowshoes)

-Changing their colour white in winter to blend in with the snow to avoid predators (or to sneak up on prey)

-Huddle with other creatures to share body heat

-Create a burrow or home to hide in and warm up in

 Two student nurses visited us as part of the Apple A Day program on nutrition.  Through games, pictures and questions students talked about the food groups and sometimes foods.  Look at your dinner tonight and discuss which food groups are represented.  The most interesting thing was seeing how much sugar is in a can of coke (definitely a sometimes food!)

We started our curling residency this afternoon.  We started by playing some games to learn some curling terminology.

Rock- object you slide

House- rings you try to get the rock into

Button- the circle in the middle of the house (target)

Broom

Hurry

The children learned to score and played three ends.  Look at the picture of the house above.  Have your child tell you who won and what the score was.   We also focussed on how to show sportsmanship.  We can't wait to curl again next week!