November 29th, 2011

On Tuesday, November 22nd the students in Gill-Ville from Ryerson P.S. enjoyed a great morning at the Blair Outdoor Ed Centre.  In addition to checking out the cool creatures, we spent some time talking about migration, climate change, and endangered species. This was special for us because we are learning about the issues polar bears are facing in northern Canada through our work with Polar Bears International  and the community on Edmodo .  You can read our post about it on our class blog  Mr. Rasberry talked with us about how some creatures know how to migrate and we learned that butterflies and some birds use the Earth’s magnetism to fly south to warmer weather.  We also learned that a compass uses the Earth’s magnetism the same way to always point north!  Mr. Rasberry taught us how to use a compass and we played a really fun game outside using the compass to find different locations in the field. Thanks, Mr. Rasberry for a great morning of learning!  When we returned to school, we used sumopaint (an online drawing program) to draw our images and then we used the program Comic Life to explain how to use the compass!  Here is a sample of our work created by Jacob.  Can you use these instructions to find directions with a compass?

Editor’s Note:  We are very pleased to have received some student work from Ms. Gill’s class to post on “outdooredguys” and we would welcome more of the same!! If your students would like to write about their experience at one of our OEE Centres,  about a topic in science you are studying, or anything to do with nature and the environment, the outdooredguys would love to hear from you.