On Monday, we started working on our Thanksgiving writing/drawing project. Students got to choose from 3 writing prompts about Thanksgiving: what they are thankful for, their favorite thanksgiving tradition, or what they would make if they cooked thanksgiving dinner. We will put the finished products together into a Thanksgiving book. We also practiced our sign names and began collecting pictures of each students signing their name for our classroom sign names book.
On Tuesday, the weather was yucky. There was a mix of freezing rain, snow, and ice that made it so that we could not go outside (something that almost never happens). Since the gym was unavailable, we got creative! We went on a walk through the hallway, finding new and creative ways to move. We also had a long dance party in the classroom and discovered the joys of GoNoodle, a website with great videos for kids to dance/move with.
On Wednesday, children had a lot of questions about extreme weather (specifically tornados and hurricanes). This prompted us to take out the National Geographic Kids book “Little Kids First Big Book of Weather” and do some great scientific learning as well as some talk about geography. We also had fun with the mix of snow and water that we found on our playground.
On Thursday, there wasn’t too much snow left on the ground. However, the big kids had built a big snow structure with giant snowballs that was still standing. One of the giant snowballs broke off of the structure, and our students had fun rolling the snowball, putting it on a sled and pulling it up the hill together, and sledding down the hill with it! At the end of outside time, we took the giant snowball (which we had named Olaf) inside in our garden cart to find out how long it would take for a snowball that size to melt inside of our classroom. We started taking data on the snowball as soon as we got inside. We used our tape measures from the math center to measure around the snowball, we wrote down the day and the time of day, and we took a picture of it. At the very end of the day, we repeated that process and found that it was already 10 cm smaller.
On Friday, the snowball experiment continued. When we got to school in the morning, we found that the snowball was only 75 cm wide (compared to 115 cm when we brought it inside) and it was sitting in a pool of water. At morning meeting, we read the book “Water is Water,” a beautifully illustrated book that shows each phase of water. We connected what we learned from the book to our snowball experiment. Later, our sixth grade buddies came to our classroom! We read a thanksgiving story together, and they helped us make handprint turkeys! At the very end of the day, we checked on our snowball to find that it was nothing but water. It took more than a day for that giant snowball to melt!
Samuel Morey Preschool Blog 