
Sophie Martin
Grade 4 Teacher, Rigaud, QUÉBEC
I teach almost all subjects to grade 4 students at College Bourget in Quebec. I have been teaching there for 10 years.
I teach almost all subjects to grade 4 students at College Bourget in Quebec. I have been teaching there for 10 years. This past year, I tried to elaborate on the science activities that I do with my class in an effort to organize the creation of a laboratory with my colleagues. The activities that my colleagues and I created activities to teach the students about acids and bases, simple machines, the living world, electricity, and the environment. Some examples of the activities we did are building bathquakes, building vehicles that can travel by using gravity, creating a habitat for an organism, building an electronic game, and designing a house that uses environmentally friendly energy.
Project – I found particular success with the bathquake project with my students. Not only did they learn about acids and bases, they also were able to understand basic scientific concepts by doing this project. They learned about scientific investigation and scientific regularities. They also learned measurements, learned how to measure accurately, and were able to formulate their representation of various measurements (such as a gram and a millimetre). The students particularly liked this project because they were able to give the final project to their parents.