3-Day Landed on the Moon!
We enjoyed our study of outer space this week. Your children loved learning about the sun, the moon and many planets out there in our galaxy. We spent the week immersed in galaxy slime at our sensory table. We used snow in our discovery table as it looked a lot like the surface of the moon. We used Model Magic clay to sculpt our own version of the moon and craters. The children worked with collage materials to create the fiery surface of the sun. Hopefully you got a chance to see them outside in the hallway! Many of our table activities included patterning and counting. These are skills we try to integrate each and every day we are together. We sang songs about space and changed our morning song to a countdown and blast off into playtime. Your children have been counting BACKWARDS from 10, and we are sure they would be thrilled to demonstrate their take off at home!
On Monday we had a visit from Africa2U. Vivian Birchall showed us many musical instruments, handmade toys, songs and taught us some Ugandan dancing! The children were terrific listeners and they had so much fun dancing to the music.
The highlight of our week was our parade and trip to the moon on Friday. Most of us put on our new space helmets, turned on our oxygen, stepped into some pretend space boots and gloves and took off to into outer space (aka through Pre-K and 5-Day). We collected moon rocks - made from aluminum foil by the children themselves - that were spread all over the big room and the children had a blast running around collecting as many as they could!
I look forward to meeting with you next Wednesday for conferences. The following Wednesday, 4/11 at 11:30 we will be doing a short performance of Chicka Chicka Boom Boom with 5-Day and Pre-K in the big room upstairs. You are welcome to join us for the performance and stay for lunch but if you cannot make it we promise to send you a video so you won’t miss it!
Next week we will mooooove on into our farm unit. You may have heard some news about hatching baby chicks. I’ve been housing 12 eggs at my house over the past two weeks and plan to bring them to school on Monday in hopes that by April 2nd we will have some real baby chicks hatching! This will hopefully be a very special part of our farm unit. On Monday at morning meeting we plan to talk about what chicks need before they hatch out of their eggs and how to keep them safe in our classroom. Feel free to ask your children what their thoughts are for welcoming the chicks on Monday.
In the meantime, If anyone has larger-sized stuffed farm animals your child might be willing to lend to the classroom for the duration of our unit, we would welcome the temporary donations! We also want to make butter and are in need of small glass jars. We realize they are hard to come by these days but you can sometimes still find baby food, jams and some yogurts that come in glass. Thanks in advance!
Have a wonderful weekend!
Karen and Emily