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