A Great Time for Learning!

It is hard to believe another month of school is over!  Where does the time go?  Well, we know that our time at school is very busy and full of great learning opportunities.  Take a look at the photos below to see just a peek of some of the  activities our students are engaged in.

Many of our student enjoy building with Lego and by putting the Lego into one of our sensory bins, the activity changed!  Before you know it, the children cooperated together to build "LEGO LAND".  We made roads, and signs and buildings.  We added words and letters to our play

Over the past 2 weeks, we have been enjoying stories by author Jan Brett.  This week we read the story, "The Three Bears".  After reading the story, some of the children noticed that this story is very similar to the story of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears".  We call this a "TEXT TO TEXT CONNECTION" when we compare different stories.  In Jan Brett's "The Three Bears", the story takes place in a cold, snowy place where a polar bear family lives in an igoo.  The children really enjoyed this story and shortly after hearing it, a small group of students became involved in making their very own "igloos" using cubes and bear manipulatives.  Great retelling! 

During playtime, we put out sugar cubes and marshmallows and the children got to work at building their own igloos, once again adding the little bears to retell the story.  We saw some very creative building at this center!

Our Super Science Wednesday activity continued with our "melting and freezing inquiry".  Over the past few weeks we have been talking about melting and freezing.  The weather has certainly provided a great opportunity for this exploration.  Today, we focused on melting, using a griddle, aluminum muffin tray and a variety of materials (e.g., candle, crayon, freeze, butter, hershey kiss, cheese, sugar cube, cupcake sprinkles and a marshmallow).  We made predictions about which item would melt the fastest.  We observed the butter melted very very quickly.  We were surprised that the marshmallow and the sprinkles didn't really change at all.  We were sure to explain to the children how important it is to be safe around heat sources (e.g., griddle, candles, fireplace, campfire).  As usual, we were impressed with the wonderful job the children did at following directions during this activity.  A small group of friends were so excited about this activity that they wanted to write about our predictions, observations and findings.  We have started a new bulletin board in our classroom that display all of our "Super Science" discoveries!