Far Out!

Dear Parents,

We painted our spaceship white. The children worked in groups of four with paint rollers. They were excited to paint the ship. We also painted our space helmets white, and our oxygen tanks too.  

We read  A Trip To Mars and Life on Mars. One book was fiction about a little girl who goes to Mars with her kitty while the other was a non-fiction book about real robots going to Mars. We talked about the differences. The class knew a child could not really go to Mars alone, with just her kitty. 

When we read I Want To Be An Astronaut, the class noticed that the spaceship in the book was white like ours, and had an American flag on it. 

We had a practice Blast Off! to make sure ground control and the astronauts knew what to do during the Blast Off! We had to rearrange a couple of details. One astronaut kept getting out of the ship before we landed; ground control asked him to wait for the other astronauts, or sit to the side. He decided to reboard the spacecraft. 

We brainstormed names for our spaceship, and then voted. The choices were Director Spaceship Fire, Hark the Herald Angels Sing, Elephant X-Wing, Strawberry House, Sun Romano Sino, and Trumpet of the Sun. We will add the name to our ship next week.

In the classroom we have been working in large groups to assemble our outer space puzzle, an animal puzzle, and to connect our train set. We have been playing with our Earth animals on the carpet, while at the table using magnet boards to create words with letters. 

We have finally been spending more time outside as the kitchen construction is drawing to an end, and the sun is shining. One day in the yard almost the entire class spontaneously started a game of Duck, Duck, Goose. It was so much fun to witness the cooperation, turn taking, and listening skills exhibited in this display of fun. 

Reminder: parents are invited to our Blast Off! Thursday February 15 @9:30am.

Your children are piles of joy!

Therese

What in the World?

Dear Parents,

We completed our planets this week. We covered our Uranus in glue and blueish feathers.  We used bubble wrap to make our Neptune, but not before we spent lots of time and fine motor skills popping all the bubbles. It was exciting and a lot of effort.  We made a tiny dwarf  Pluto using black clay. 

While half the class worked out in gymnastics with Casey, the rest of us worked on making a moon mobile. We used clay and pipe cleaners. We hung the moons in our outer space mural.

We began building our spaceship. We cut two giant boxes into four boxes. One friend said, "Two plus two is four, and three plus one is four." After everyone had a chance to get inside, one person asked, “How will we make them go?” We asked the children if they thought our pretend spaceships would really fly around the room? We talked about what real spaceships are made of, and how many people, and how many years it takes to make them fly. 

During circle we acted like robots and then talked about robots and machines that go into outer space to do research. One such machine took nine years to travel to Pluto and do a fly by. We looked at how far our Earth is from our Pluto and thought about a spacecraft traveling that far. Wow.

We made flags in preparation for our trip to the moon. The class made thirty-six different flags. We looked in a book at flags for inspiration. Some copied flags they liked and some made up their own flags. Flags that children liked and copied were from Japan, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Jamaica, Mauritius, Monaco, Libya, Angola, and the U.S.A.

We read about the mystery of the missing tomato, the first one grown in outer space on the International Space Station. And about Frank Rubio, the astronaut who grew it, spending more than a year in outer space. 

Parents will be invited for our Blast Off! on Thursday February 15th at 9:30 am. The class will board the spaceship, take a trip to the moon, and return in approximately twenty minutes. 

Signing off, 

Therese