The past two weeks we have been getting deeper and deeper into our project work. Our costumes are finished, we’ve done a lot of fall and Halloween related activities, but now we’re also working on expanding our ideas about rocket ships and outer space, along with many painting provocations to help us get started as we build our own definition for paint.
Painting / Emotions
As our school wide intention for this year is paint, we have been doing a lot of exploratory work with this medium. Some of our recent work includes: painting with forks, painting with corks, painting with tubes, using spoons with a glue/paint mixture, using our hands to paint, painting on a variety of surfaces, using sponges to paint, and watercolor paint in both liquid and solid forms.
One recurrent theme that pops up while painting is that it creates emotions - a lot of children are very happy while they are painting, and a few are horrified if their hands or bodies get dirty in any way. Some children are focused and quiet, while others are fast and loud and laughing. We have made a point to follow the expressions on the children’s faces to help us capture more about the emotional connection we have to paint.
Next week there will be a panel all about painting, our research questions, and how we intend to work with and follow paint this year - please come in and check it out if you have the time! It will definitely be ready by next Wednesday when you’re here for the Halloween parade & party.
Rocket ships & Outer Space
A few new stories in our classroom have sparked even more conversation about space and the vehicles needed to get there. One book has little flaps to lift up and discover how astronauts can function while they are traveling through space. Another has really amazing images of real rocket ships, robotic arms, satellites, and everything else you can think of relating to space travel.
We have been working in steps- starting very small and making cork rocket ships, and now we are working on bigger ones using recycled tubes. Our goal is to try and make a rocket ship that we can get inside next!
Hopefully our parade next week with our rocket ship costumes will ignite more conversation!
How to get a book
John and Finn really enjoy reading the books Tip Tip Dig Dig and Tap Tap Bang Bang by Emma Garcia and have noticed that there is a book pictured on the back cover that we don’t have called Toot Toot Beep Beep. Today they mentioned it again, and we started talking about how we would have to order the book, but to order we need to have money. “We need money then we order it!” John expertly told us. So we started to talk about how we could earn the money. Rachel suggested that we could do some cooking and sell treats to the rest of the school, and Eudenis had an amazing idea- we could make cookies that look like stars and rocket ships! Finn really liked this idea, “I can make the rocket ship cookies!” So after the craziness of Halloween next week, we will start planning a small bake sale so we can order the book soon! Our first step will be creating a poster to announce the sale to the school - we can’t wait to see where this takes us!
Specialists
On Tuesday we had cooking with Diane. We created a magic potion by using a hand blender to mix apple and grape juice together.
On Wednesday we had soccer with Coach Jojo and continued to work on our listening skills and ability to use our feet with the soccer balls.
Friends who stay at school past 12:00 had Yoga and Karate this week
Next week we will meet our new music teacher, Emily! And we will continue Spanish with Ernestina (she mixed up times this week and skipped us! But we still do Spanish EVERY day with Eudenis before lunch time).
Project Work
During our music and movement project, we started listening to Peter & the Wolf! We learned about all of the characters and their corresponding instruments, and then we listened to the first few minutes of the story. On Monday we will continue where we left off and meet the cat, the grandfather, and the wolf!
For science we made a dough out of cornstarch and dish soap
For math, we worked with shapes to create the face of our jack-o-lantern!
We worked on making a jack-o-lantern face for cooking this week using rice cakes, sunbutter, banana slices and blueberries
We worked with model magic instead of clay this week and created a big pumpkin (we voted between making a pumpkin and making the earth). After squishing the model magic down into a circle, we added finger paint (red and yellow to make our own orange), glitter, and glue to seal it all together!
Building continues to be a very big interest in the class. The bristle blocks were especially interesting this week, and became a whole fleet of different boats and submarines! We also used magna-tiles to create more rocket ships!
