We had another short week cut even shorter by this winter weather! Even though it was a shorter week, we got a lot accomplished! Since we didn't finish our penguin walking experiment last week, we finished it on Wednesday. The children had a really hard time keeping the eggs between their legs and they had a really fun time trying to get across the 'finish line'.
After our experiment we documented in our exploration journals. Hayden wrote, "I am waddling like a penguin." Emma wrote, "It was hard to put the egg between my legs."
Sebastian wrote, "I waddle like a penguin."
We also documented in our journals our blubber experiment from last week. We documented that the blubber glove was warmer because we noticed that when our hand was in the ice water in the blubber glove, it kept our hand warmer.
I forgot to get a picture but our class voted on our favorite polar animals and we had a large amount of children choose penguins. So instead of splitting into groups of animals like we did for our Ohio animals study, we are going to do a penguin study! The children are so excited! We learned that there are many different types of penguins and we looked up pictures of each and made a list. We also made a list of what we already know about penguins as well as what we would like to learn about them.
We read the March of the Penguins book as well as watched some of the movie and the children really enjoyed these as well!
We decided they wanted to make a map of the world to show where the polar regions are. We researched what it looked like and decided what we would need to make it. So we started ripping white paper for the ice and polar regions.
Thursday was our carnival math night. Mrs. George & I were at the estimation station game and we got to see many of our friends who came to visit us and made guesses as to how many items were in the jars. It was nice to see the children and their family members enjoying the math games set up and having a great time! We had rubber bands, erasers, crayons and mints. The child with the closest guess got to take the items home with them on Friday and keep them! Sebastian had the closest guess for the crayons with 91. There were actually 92.
On Friday we had a few West Carrollton firefighters come and show the children what they looked like with all of their gear on, what their air tank sounded like and what they sounded like with their mask on. This helps the children see that they are not scary and understand that if they come to their house dressed like this, they are there to help you and save your life!
We also updated the kids achievement rings with the 2nd quarter benchmarks they were able to accomplish. They were all very proud!
We also decided that for the land on the globe that we wanted to use brown and green paper. We had to rip a lot of paper in order to make all of the land on the map so the children enjoyed using their small hands muscles to do so.
This is one of the videos we watched about the 7 continents and polar regions. The children really enjoyed it so I have included the link if you would like to check it out!
http://youtu.be/Xy7e_KAUz7s
Here is our map so far. We made an outline of the continents with pencil that you can't see very well but it will help us when we are gluing on the paper.
I can't wait to see where this study takes us next and am excited to begin researching for our projects.
Have a great week and stay warm!!
Mrs. Brittany Garrabrant
