Over the long winter break, Grade 6 students worked on a special Science project. Their task was to write a story, describing the journey of a particle through the three states of matter. Many interesting stories were submitted. The students chose the most scientific and creative story. Here is the winning story:

Rain at Last

It all started as I levitated out of the boiling water in the kitchen. I flew out of the window in an incredible speed and raced up towards the clouds. I felt so free and loose. My friends were close behind me. I knew they were, but I couldn’t actually see them since water vapour is invisible. What I could see was small droplets of water around me. Together all of these small droplets formed a stream rising up from the kettle of boiling water. This was visible to the eye.

As we flew further up,  it began to get colder and colder. We tried to get warm by hugging each other, instead we turned into a little, tiny droplet of water. I began to feel dense and compact now. More and more of our friends flew toward us. We grew bigger and bigger the more time we stayed in the clouds. The cloud flew from Denmark to Germany. As the cloud was passing through Germany, I started to cough. It had become all dark around us. I looked down and I saw a factory right below us. I started to smell a strong scent of Sulphur dioxide in the air. I licked myself over the lips and surprisingly I could taste sourness. I had become an acid rain drop!

As we flew over Slovenia the air started to clean. Still, I was still very acidic. As we flew over Italy the next day,  I started falling away from the cloud. I had become so heavy the cloud could not hold me up anymore. I had never been moving this fast. I bolted down towards earth at an unstoppable speed. It was like parachute jumping without a parachute. It was only about two hundred meters to fall. Finally, I fell into a large forest. It was winter here and as I landed on a leaf; I began to feel extreme coldness in me.

I started to become more solid bit by bit and I could feel myself expand a little since I was turning to ice. I felt myself get separated from my friends a little bit. As we stopped separating there was a little bit of air between us. Even though we were stuck together, I didn’t feel at all dense, I felt freer than when I was even still liquid water. We would be able to float on water now because the air between us would hold us. I was about to fall off the leaf and I froze completely. I felt the two hydrogen atoms in my body tug together with the oxygen atom. They were stuck together so hard that I couldn’t move anymore. I was stuck. The slightest breeze swept by and I fell down. I hit the floor and burst into a million pieces. We rolled into a puddle and we didn’t sink.

This was the end we all knew. Then everything froze around me, and I was stuck in a big frozen chunk of ice. Forever. I was wrong! The sun came out and heated us up. We started slipping around each other. I went down a mountain and then joined a larger stream. Finally, we splashed into a lake. This is when everything started over again.

Author: Aron, Grade 6

This week, our younger primary students expanded their social emotional learning by having a “Mindful Monday”.

They learned how to know and sense when their feelings were energetic like a tornado or needing to wake up like a starfish. All of them found ways to calm down through deep breaths, counting to 10 and jogging in place. Our little starfish practiced stretching their muscles, splashing cool water on their faces and eating a healthy snack to wake up and be ready to learn.

Our little starfish are, most importantly, expressing how they feel and learning what to do to feel happier while learning from home.

And they created a rainbow display of feelings they can talk about and manage.

text: LF