Dear Parents,
On Monday we started building our volcano. We read Earth, Moon, and Volcanoes. We read that sometimes there are earthquakes near volcanoes. We saw a picture in our book of a solar eclipse. We built our volcano using newspaper and tape. The class said it should be the shape of a mountain, or a triangle. So, we shaped a mountain out of paper, and the next day we added red Mexican clay, from the Earth. We wet it and smoothed it over the paper. After quiet time we saw the beginnings of a real solar eclipse.
Someone asked, “Why are we building a volcano?” We looked up at our planet Earth and asked what planet has volcanoes. The class shouted “Earth!” We will ask what other planets have volcanoes next week.
We reviewed our six simple machines during circle. Which one would be the fastest way to get away from a volcano? After many ideas, someone shouted, “A race car!” Yes, wheels and axles! We also connected our simple machine study to a real NASA lesson asking children what simple machines could be used in a real spaceship? The class had many ideas, most of which involved safety issues.
On Thursday we used papier-mache to cover the rest of our volcano by soaking red and orange construction paper in watery glue that one child described as white paint. Our volcano could blow any second, but as one child said, “Our lava is cooking.”
We read The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. The children asked why the tree was described as “happy but not really". Someone said, because the boy took all her apples and branches. Another said, because the boy was old. Another said, because she had no one else but the boy. Someone pointed out that on the last page, she didn’t have her branches or her apples but she was still happy. We compared the pictures and saw that she was unhappy when she was alone, and happy when the boy was with her. Later we played in the big room with Lightning Bolt, our robot, and our spaceship.
On Friday, we had music with Alex. While half the class was enjoying music, we read Mickey’s Magnet. We discussed how Mickey was making guesses about what his magnet would and wouldn’t stick to by experimenting. We decided to do the same thing with our alphabet magnets. We tried a cardboard tube, a screw, a wire bread tie, a plastic toy, staples, and a hole punch among other things. We made guesses about what our magnets would stick to, and were surprised by several results! Our biggest surprise was finding two very strong magnets hidden inside our hole punch, which we extracted for future experiments.
We went to play in our muddy yard and continued to observe flowers blooming, insects stretching and waking up, and seeds and seed pods falling to the ground.
Have a healthy weekend,
Therese and Alli