Red and Green Holiday Fun Day

We had a great day today as we celebrated our "Red and Green Holiday Fun Day".  Thanks to all the parents who did such a great job helping out.  The children were engaged in a variety of holiday activities including painting candy canes, making reindeer headbands, making reindeer food, reading letters from Santa, playing holiday bingo and enjoying a Smart Board story about a gingerbread boy.

Exploring Battery Power!

This week's Super Science Wednesday was lots of fun as at the children explored the use of batteries to make toys move.  Different than the use of "people power" (as explored last Wednesday), the children talked about and had a "hands-on" opportunity to examine the use of batteries as a source of energy.  Thanks to everyone who brought in a battery powered toy for this great learning opportunity.  We will continue to explore other sources of energy to make toys move in the upcoming weeks. 

Elephants Have Wrinkles!

As we teach the children to create "I Wonder…" statements to lead to further learning, we continue to model this practice to them.   Today, Mrs. Ducharme wondered why elephants have wrinkles.  We then had a discussion about other things that have wrinkles.  What great answers the children came up including paper, clothes, crocodiles and on our fingers after a bath!

The children have really enjoyed the following song.  We hope you can enjoy it at home too:

Elephants Have Wrinkles song

ELMER THE ELEPHANT LEADS TO AN INQUIRY

Last week, we began reading the story of Elmer.  Elmer is an colorful patchwork elephant, who doesn't like that he is different.  The children really enjoyed this story and before we knew it our students were creating their very own "Elmers" at the art center. 

Our interest in Elmer, then developed into an interest in real elephants.  The children participated in a simple "book talk" in which they looked at different books about elephants and shared interesting things they had found in the books.  It was great to hear and see such excitement over books.  This has lead to discussion of the difference between fiction and non-fiction books.  

We went on an "elephant parade" on Friday, just the elephants in the story did!  What fun!

The M&M Experiment

Another exciting Super Science Wednesday!  Today we posed the following "I wonder":

I WONDER WHAT WILL HAPPEN IF WE PUT M&Ms IN WATER.

We made a list of the MATERIALS we would need for this experiment: bowl, water, M&Ms

Then we discussed our PREDICTIONS about what would happen and Mrs. Ducharme recorded them on a chart paper.  We had a variety of answers such as the M&Ms would melt, the M&Ms would disappear, the color red would come off and so on.

Then came the best part.  We worked in small groups of 2 or 3 and had to OBSERVE what happened.  An important part of this experiment was to put the M&Ms in the water with the letter M facing up.  We put 4 or 5 M&Ms in each bowl with a small amount of water.  Then we waited!  We also had to be sure not to bump or shake the bowl, as that might AFFECT the results of our experiment.

It was hard to capture in photographs, but we tried.  We discovered with much excitement that the color comes of the M&Ms and the M&Ms turn white and brown.  Another word we could use when describing this is DISSOLVE.  The water was described by the kids as looking like a "rainbow".   The most exciting part came next…the letter M on the M&M came off the top of the M&M and floated to the top of the water!  You can imagine the excitement when the children discovered this.  This is a great experiment to try at home.  

We then got busy RECORDING the RESULTS of our experiment so we could put it in our Super Science Journal.