Happy Ohi Day to you! We celebrate Ohi day to remember to embrace peace, reject war, and work to make the world a better place for everyone. We started our day by discussing what it means to work for peace, and Tove did a great job comparing it to being good classmates in school. During the program, we sang songs, listened to the history of Ohi Day, and heard about the value of peace. When we finished the program, we came back to the classroom to record our thoughts. We all decided to represent peace in different ways. Yianni drew a hand showing the peace sign, while the hand Gia drew was ‘to be used for helping people’. Anja drew two people playing together instead of fighting, while Sokrates drew a ‘quiet’ picture, to show how peace feels to him. We remembered all the songs we had just sung, so Teddy wrote another song about peace, and Tove showed everyone singing together. (One of my favorites was Jerome’s strawberry picture: “Strawberries taste good,” he explained, “so people don’t fight because the strawberries make them
happy!”) There are a lot of great educational pieces here (representing emotions, using cultural symbols, etc), but today I just want to highlight how important it is for our students to be peacemakers and good citizens of the world. Please, have a conversation today or this week about how we can all work to bring about peace in our lives and make the world a better place!
Even though we spent a good bit of time with the Ohi day activities, we still did a TON of learning today. In our building time, we experimented with shadows and our magnatiles. Teddy realized the tiles were reflecting light onto the rice table and also explained that the shadow of one tile was bigger because it was on top. This linked nicely to what Jerome and Yianni investigated; they explained to me how moving the light and tiles closer to the screen made them brighter but smaller, while further away the shadows were bigger but dimmer. Gia also realized that the shadow of the tiles was bigger than the tiles themselves, and Niki explored how adding more tiles made different colors but made the shadows darker. Bisola liked mixing in a different kind of magnatiles that didn’t cast colored shadows, they just cast black lines. Rebecca showed the class how moving the light made the shadows move, even though the tiles weren’t moving. We learned a lot today about translucency, color blending, and how shadows change with distance, all important pieces of physical knowledge.
Our other big project for the day is happy and sad at the same time. Some of the class started to recognize that our colored play-doh was starting to dry out and we weren’t as excited about the colors as we were before; so now it is time to make a new batch!! Before we cook it up next week, we wanted to do one last project with the batch we already had. Today we picked one last shape to make and left out the play-doh to dry; some of us decided to make sculptures, while others made stamps. Niki realized she had enough to make two different star stamps, while Yianni decided to sculpt a whole lion family. Rebecca wanted to make a cat stamp she could use
to make a really cool kitty picture when it dried, but Sokrates was interested in showing how he could make a worm sculpture without using any tools. Gia used a cookie cutter to make a turkey stamp. It was great for us to experience how to make a stamp, how to create a sculpture, and it will be useful for us to see how what we made changed as it dried and what it will be like to paint it.
In our read aloud today, we found out about the disgusting snozzcumbers the BFG has to eat. Timo managed to infer that we would be talking about what the giant ate, since we reviewed that the last chapter ended with him getting hungry. The biggest part of the read-aloud, however, was the struggle we had with words like wondercrump, wrapwrascal, snipswinkles, and scotchhopper. Suddenly, Sokrates realized that the BFG was a giant and might not talk like a human, so they might be made up-words. We talked about what
we thought a wondercrump might look like, and things got pretty silly. Our ability to use made up words and infer from a book’s structure what will happen next are foundational skills I am glad to see evidence of in their work.
Just a note, their work with shadows and light has convinced me they would probably benefit from a light table. I was looking around and found some great DIY options that look fun for the kids. This is the one I’ll probably follow. If any of you have an extra under the bed storage container (or other really big, clear-topped plastic container) that you aren’t using, let me know! Hopefully, we’ll find one and get the kids using it soon!
