Our students have been enjoying the warmer weather and more opportunities to play outdoors! Many students have been playing role - play games outdoors. We have had "families" of bears live under the "cave" and several cake bakeries serving delicious mud and mulch cakes. Other students have enjoyed making their own games, playing limbo with the jump ropes, making obstacle courses, playing with bubbles, and digging for worms! We have also done animal relays such as crab walks, snake slithering, and bear crawling. Observing our kids create their own imaginative games to play outside has been exciting. Their personalities shine brightly when we are playing outside!
We will continue to play outside this week and explore the outdoor classroom. We will also do a special shadow activity by tracing shadows from nature onto white paper!
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The beginning of Spring has inspired many new interests in Extended Day - students have started noticing ladybugs, butterflies, and insects of all kinds! We started our insect study by having students come up with questions about insects that they wanted answers to. These questions became the "guide" for our insect study and activities:
In the past three weeks, students have started to investigate these questions by tracing insects with loose parts, designing their own insects, comparing real photos of insects, using insect x - rays to look at exoskeletons, and observing six crickets in our classroom. Students designed habitats in jars for the six crickets and voted on names for the crickets. We talked about what the crickets needed to live. Many students pointed out that the insects needed water, food, and a safe place - just like humans! Students enjoyed drawing pictures of our crickets, taking their own photographs of the crickets, and adding items to the crickets habitats. After we observed the crickets for two days, we went outside to release our crickets and make our final observations. Students had the chance to hold the crickets before releasing them. Our students who held the crickets said: "It's tickling me!" "This cricket is fast!" "It feels creepy." "Some crickets are slower." "I can feel ALL the legs!" Now that we have answered our questions about insects, we have started to wonder more about the needs of other animals. We will start to explore the needs of different animals by researching cold - weather and warm - weather animals this week! One of my main goals for Extended Day is to support students in exploring their own interests. I listen to the stories that children tell me, ask them what they want to learn about, observe what they like to draw, and watch what they like to build. Three big interests that I observed this week were flowers/gardening, robotics, and Passover. After observing these interests, I created special challenges, checked out new books from the library, created new stations, and organized special activities so that students could really explore their interests.
Some of the activities students enjoyed this week included:
Once upon a time, in Room 136, students decorated a chair for a special Mystery Reader, found hidden shapes with watercolors, and designed different types of bridges for the Three Billy Boats Gruff to pass.
Last week we read the original The Three Little Pigs and I noticed that many of our students really enjoyed this fairytale. Students started drawing pictures from the book and asking great questions about the story. Since they enjoyed the original book so much, I decided to share The Three Ninja Pigs by Corey Rosen Schwartz, The True Story of the Three Little Pigs by Jon Scieszka, and The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig by Eugene Trivizas with them this week. We took a class vote and The Three Ninja Pigs was the favorite for most students.
After reading these different versions of the three little pigs, I wanted to give students an opportunity to try to build their own house for the "Big Bad Wolf" to blow down. Students used empty milk cartons, wood chips, rocks, sticks from the playground, hay, and Lego bricks to fill their milk - carton house. Students then decorated the houses using markers, scrapbook paper, magazine advertisements, crayons, oil pastels, and markers. Many students enjoyed making "doors" for their house. After students finished building and decorating their houses, I brought in a blow dryer and tried to "blow" their houses down! Students really enjoyed seeing if their house was strong enough to survive the blow dryer. Some students went back to the design table and made changes to their house (adding more rocks, taking out hay and lego bricks) to see if they could improve their original design! Students were very engaged in the design process of the experiment and made great observations about this activity. Some of my favorite student comments were: "I wonder if putting sticks on top of the rocks makes it harder to blow down" "I mixed the lego bricks with the rocks to make my house extra strong" "Paper doesn't make it stronger" "My house is made of bricks so I used just bricks" We will continue exploring more fairytales this week and doing similar crafts/experiments! I will be sharing The Three Billy Goats Gruff with students on Monday and they will be designing bridges to support the weight of a plastic animal of their choice. We also have our first Mystery Reader visiting the classroom on Friday! Once upon a time, there were 18 Hasten Hebrew Academy Students who explored bubbles, clay, Simon Says, making puppets, and dyeing rice in the same week! Our students enjoyed starting our fairy tale study last week by reading The True Story of the Three Little Pigs and the original The Three Little Pigs. Students also created clay figurines for our dollhouse so they can recreate stories from their favorite fairytales. Another favorite activity was dyeing rice for our sensory bin. Students picked out creative names for the color combinations they invented, including:
"Happy Elephant Blue" "Pretty for Purim" "Magic Colors" "Cotton Candy Unicorn" Students also enjoyed our time outside last week! We played several games of "Simon Says" and tag. We also experimented with our new bubble wands and tools! We will continue our fairytale study this week by exploring other versions of The Three Little Pigs, recreating the story, drawing our own illustrations to the story, and having a guest reader! Students will also have the chance to build their own miniature house and see if the Big Bad Wolf can blow it down. I am excited to share several fun activities with your child! Ah hoy, matey! The "pirates" in Extended Day enjoyed a variety of games, crafts, and activities during our pirates unit. Many students enjoyed playing pirate bingo, exploring dramatic play, going on class treasure hunts, and creating a pirate ship for our classroom. We also read the book Pirate Pete by Kim Kennedy and then wrote a collaborative letter to Pirate Pete. After writing our letter to Pirate Pete, students each drew a picture of what they would want to find in a treasure box!
In addition to our pirate activities, students also enjoyed getting ready for Purim! We sang several Purim songs and created large cardboard castles using paint, oil pastels, and loose parts. Students really liked working together to create the collaborative castles. We will be adding these castles to Dramatic Play and making Queen Crowns and King Crowns! Decorating flower pots, constructing trees from paper towel rolls, and building a collaborative forest have been some of the highlights from Extended Day this week! Students have enjoyed preparing for Tu BiShvat by talking about the different types of trees that grow in Israel this time of year, making their own trees from paper towel rolls and loose parts, and working on our collaborative class forest. Many students were surprised to learn that almonds grow on trees.
In addition to our Tu BiShvat activities, students have also enjoyed playing "Asteroid Bowling." Asteroid Bowling is a new game to our classroom. We are using asteroids made from tin foil and recycled metal cans to bowl with! Students really enjoy sitting the bowling "pins" up in different positions for their peers. During open centers, many students choose to play family in our dramatic play area. Students like to switch their roles between being a parent, a child, a baby, or a pet during dramatic play.
We started off our space study by reading I Want to be an Astronaut by Byron Barton and brainstorming a list of space topics that students wanted to learn more about. We also talked about ideas for projects that our students would like to complete during our space study. Each student had several ideas of topics and projects that they would like explore during our space study! It was exciting to see individual interests emerge during our discussion after our story. The space topics that our students are most interested in are constellations, space shuttles, and moon phases. We incorporated these interests by designing windows on paper plates to display around the classroom. Students created scenes for their windows an then helped wrap the windows in aluminum foil. The scenes students made displayed what they think they would see from a space ship. We traced students on white paper and gave them choices of materials to decorate their own astronauts, drew constellations using white chalk on black paper, started decorating our class space shuttle Shuttle 136, and observed moon phases. Students really enjoyed using chalk and photos of moon phases to draw the phases of the moon. Throughout the week, students began to show an interest in space vehicles, asteroids, and designing their own planets. We incorporated these interests by providing students with loose parts to construct their own space rovers and vehicles, bringing in new books about space vehicles, and giving students a chance to make their own asteroids out of foil. We used the asteroids for a game of asteroid toss. On Friday, students worked in small groups to design a "Jungle Planet" and an "Ocean Planet." This combined out students interest in different ecosystems with their love for planets. Students using a variety of materials and photos from magazines to decorate their planets. We will continue working on our planets next week by giving students a chance to design characters out of clay for their planets and having students dictate stories for their planets. |
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