It was a fitting day to wrap up the week, as we also wrapped up a number of our projects. We had what is likely to be our final official sharing mat, wrapped up our work with the old play-doh, and are moving on from our eye investigations. On to bigger and better things!
For our last sharing activity, I was thrilled to see a great deal of diversity in how they shared one each of honey teddy, chocolate teddy, and animal crackers with 2 people. Niki explained that she and Anja only had to split the chocolate, as they didn’t see much difference between the honey teddy and the an
imal cracker. Timo and Jerome, on the other hand, split the animal cracker since it was bigger and a different shape, but didn’t care who got the honey and who got the chocolate. Finally, Gia and Teddy split ALL of the cookies, so they would each have the same amount of everything. This was a perfect capstone. They are understanding what it means to fair share and are comfortable enough with the process to have a conversation about what they actually care about. This is a great display of their improved ability to divide, but just as great at showing how their social and discussion skills have grown in the past month. While we might revisit this throughout the year as a refreshers and extensions, I encourage you to try this with your child when the opportunity arises, just to help them fully internalize it!
In painting and stamping our play-doh sculptures, people approached painting a 3-d object in very different ways. Rebecca painted each of the holes in her sculpture a different color, to make an almost rainbow. Teddy had fun covering his play-doh ball with different colors of paint a
nd rolling it around the paper. Timo painted his snake black and explained it was a ninja snake, and Yianni advised him on how mixing black into the blue made it into a darker blue. Sokrates had made a gingerbread person with is play-doh, put just the feet in paint, and had his person ‘walk’ all over the paper, making footprints as it walked around. Jerome painted his figures with costumes and told us how they were getting ready for Halloweeen. Anja helped us all by realizing that, when the other colors mixed with the white, they couldn’t use it anymore and it disappeared. She suggested that the white paint go in the middle of the plate, so people can use it without it getting dirty. I’m looking forward to more opportunities for them to paint and create sculptures.
Our building project was to make either our house or part of our house, like a room or furniture. Gia told us how she wanted to use the big 8-unit blocks to build her house, as her house was big. Yianni made sure his house included cages to hold his pets, while Teddy liked building a bed and seeing if it was comfortable to lay on. Timo was building his bedroom, but Sokrates pointed out that his bed wasn’t flat and suggested he change it into his headboard. Rebecca experimented with different ways to construct her roof to get it to look right. This was a bit of tough building challenge, but it was great seeing how they approached a challenge and w
orked together to overcome it.
We recorded what we learned about our eyes in our journal, and it was interesting seeing what they had retained. A lot of people remembered what it was like seeing in the different colors, while Gia wrote ‘eyeball’ at the top of the page and then drew with all of the different colors her eye could see. Jerome and Sokrates had a discussion about what was the difference between the retina and the ‘poo-pil’ (I could have died). I am thrilled with the knowledge they have gained in the last two weeks and how they better understand this part of their bodies.
Our read-aloud today was painful for Mr. Chris. The BFG shared frobskottle with Sophie. Frobskottle is like soda but the bubbles don’t rise in the liquid, they sink. Well, if bubbles going up makes you burp, you can guess what happened when the bubbles sink. It stunk. All those bubbles made the characters whizzpop, which you can probably guess made the class break up. A LOT of our chapter sketches featured ‘whizzpops’. When we were discussing the chapter pictures from yesterday, Sokrates disagreed with Bisola’s sketch, as it show
ed the Bloodbottler smiling, and he thought the giant would be unhappy after biting the snozzcumber. Tove laughed because Sophie started the chapter thirsty, just after Tove came back from getting a drink.
A few housekeeping announcements. First, book orders are due on Monday. I sent home another copy of the order, or you can use the link on the right. Second, in the parent notes today they announced the parent teacher conference times. Don’t forget to sign up, and, if none of them work for you, contact me and we’ll set up another time. Hope everyone has a great weekend and can’t wait to get to work on Monday!
