Dear Parents,
On Wednesday we played outside for three hours. It was cold. We were cold. The hand warmers did a great job of keeping our fingers toasty. Mostly we just ran around to stay warm. We found many chunks of ice which were immediately smashed with all our might.
We played a few rounds of Ring Around the Rosie, and we all fell down. Several children pretended to be trains and needed new engines because theirs fell out. Once they were repaired, the engines ran around the yard some more.
We tried to dig in the sandbox but the sand was frozen solid. Instead of digging we scraped. It was frozen two days this week but that did not stop friends from working.
On Thursday we read two books titled Machines. We made a list of machines we know: clock, sewing machine, hammer, saw, drill, and pizza maker, among others. One person said they have no machines at their house.
We looked at pictures of six simple machines and defined machines as something that makes work easier. We reviewed our list to see if this was true and indeed it was! We used scissors to cut paper. We talked about scissors being a compound machine because they have wedges and a lever. We also discussed what makes machines work. Some need electricity, others need gas, and simple machines require lots of elbow grease. We explained what elbow grease means.
We read The Lion and the Bird. We noticed that the lion used two machines when working in his garden, a hoe and a rake.
On Friday we used a hammer. We hammered in the morning, we did not hammer in the evening, but y'all can at home if you like. We hammered nails randomly into one of our xmas tree stumps. We noticed it began to look like a face, so we decided to add hair made of nails. The children quickly came up with names for our creation: Hammerhead, Nail Man (as opposed to mailman), and Woodman. The names made some of us laugh as we took turns hammering.
It was a good cold week, as far as cold weeks go,
Therese