Today was a great way to wrap up our week! We celebrated Gia’s birthday and got ready for curriculum night. I hope to see all of you in a few hours.
Our reading from the BFG was pretty exciting. Anja predicted that the giant would take Sophie back home since he was a nice giant, and Tove thought Sophie was going to eat the Giant! Instead, the BFG (and Timo explained to us that the book must be named after him) showed Sophie all the other giants that wanted to eat her. Sophie wanted the BFG to stop the other giants, but we don’t know how they could even do that.
Our sharing time went a bit deeper today and it was incredibly exciting. Today, before they began, I wrote on the board that they were going to share 3 animal crackers, 2 chocolate teddies, and 1 honey teddy in groups of three. Paolo realized that he would have to break apart the honey teddy, since there was only one teddy and 3 of them. Timo predicted that he wouldn’t have to break the animal crackers, as they would each get one. However, when we broke into groups, there was some struggles. When Jerome and Yianni finished their sharing and saw that their neighbors were having trouble, they volunteered to help; they realized that one person didn’t like the cookies broken apart, even though they thought it was the same amount, so they suggested switching. Everyone now agreed it was a fair share and thanked Jerome and Yianni for their help. Next week will start the wrap up of this unit, so we will move into objects that resist division and attempt to understand remainders and might even sneak in a little multiplication, if Mr. Chris can manage it :). If you want to practice this at home, challenge your child by asking them to fix a share that ISN’T fair. How can they move the objects to make it fair, do they realize which group they need to take it away from?
In our painting time, we used styrofoam peanuts to paint. Almost everyone loved using the foam, as it was squishy, held a lot of paint, and blended the colors really well. Rebecca was very proud of the pink and green she managed to blend on her painting. Bisola recognized that, if we wanted a darker pink, we would need to add more of the red, not the white. Anja used her painting time to make flowers, while Timo painted an obstacle course and enjoyed telling us all the parts of it. Teddy thought differently and used the paint as glue and the styrofoam to represent his classmates; he made a whole classroom of kids!
Our body exploration continued investigating eyes. Another of the questions the class posed was why do we blink. To investigate this, we broke into pairs and had staring contests. We then talked about how it felt to keep our eyes open that long. Yianni complained that keeping his eyes open made his eyes feel dry, which helped Niki realize that blinking helps keep our eyes wet! Then we pretended our magnifying glasses were our eyes and investigated the classroom. However, when we simulated a little dust by sprinkling flour on the lens, Gia noticed that the dust made it harder for her to see through them. Everyone agreed that it was a problem, so we used some baby wipes to clean the lenses. Once we started talking about what it would be like if we got dust on our eyes, Sokrates realized that blinking is how we wipe our eyes off. Paolo wrapped it all up by comparing blinking to the windshield wipers on a car, and I can’t think of a better analogy than that. If you want to reinforce this idea, have a conversation with them while you’re in the car, where they blink as you use the wipers to clean the windshield. I was thrilled with the conversations we had and can’t wait to dive even deeper next week!
