Wheels, Friendship, and Dinosaurs!
1/20/2018
We began this week with our school wide Martin Luther King Jr. celebration. Our explores did a wonderful job joining the lower school for singing and signing "It's a Wonderful World." I am continually amazed at how brave our students are in performing at such a young age. This is truly an asset of being at PNA, where they get so many wonderful opportunities to practice courage. If you haven't seen the performance, there is a live stream on the Facebook page. To further celebrate, we made "Friendship Trail Mix." Each student added a different food item to make one delicious snack. We talked about how we are all different, but that together we can make something more wonderful than on our own. This week also marked the beginning of our Wheels study. As we explored this topic, we talked about what we know about Wheels and what we want to learn as we study Wheels. Our study of Wheels will provide a meaningful way for our Explores to further expand their skills in mathematics, literacy, the arts, and technology. This study will also provide an exciting way for us to learn physical science and social studies concepts. One way we investigated wheels this week was by using paint and wheeled vehicles. As we ran the cars through paint we talked about what type of tire tracks the cars were making, how the tracks changed with speed and direction, and we compared the different vehicles' tracks.
In our books, we are learning that all the capital letters can be made out of 4 shapes: big lines, little lines, big curves, and little curves. Knowing these shapes help us to make letters we don't have as much practice with or can't remember very well. It also helps us guide our pencil when we say the shapes of the letter as we write. For instance, this week we practiced the letter "F" and learned that it's shape is "big line down, frog jump up, little line, little line." This phrasing helps to keep our "little lines" (short and not extending into space), as well as to remind us to pick up our pencil in between strokes. If you are interested in an alphabet copy of this phrasing to help your child with writing at home, please let me know. We were surprised when we went to look for Ms. Bookman in the Maker's Space by rogue dinosaurs that had made a mess of the lego wall! We don't know how these dinosaurs did this, or with what class they were collaborating, but we plan on finding out next week!
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April 2021
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