Dear parents of robots,
This week we acted like robots. We. Talked. Like. Robots. We read two books that had robots in them. One was a toy robot while the other was a real robotic arm used in outer space. The children told us what they already knew about robots: they have metal parts, they have arms and
hands, legs and wheels, batteries and remote controls. Two classmates told us they have a robot at home that cleans the floor. Another person told us robots in Star Wars help people fight. Someone else said there are toy robots. One of our books said robot arms can help astronauts do dangerous things in space.
Monday we painted our robot bodies. Tuesday we were going to assemble the rest of our robots but the workers were sort of on strike so we decided to play in the big room instead!
Friday the assembly line was prepared to work. We had five stations. 1. Head assembly. 2. Head on body. 3. Eyes on head. 4. Arms on body. 5. Hands on arms. The workers worked and then had a union break. Afterwards we played with our shiny-ish new robots. The robots crawled on the carpet, flew around, landed, and then blasted off. They flew in the big room, played on the jungle gym, jumped off the stage, and flew around and around. Finally, some of the robots' batteries began to run down. We put them to rest and played on the jungle gym, tricycles, in the kitchen, and built with blocks.
Next week we have our last movement class and two sessions with Spellbound.
Have. A. Lovely. Weekend.
The ants go marching
Hi everyone,
We started our week reading How We Work and we made a list of jobs our parents do. Children said their parents work in offices, at home, and in Washington, DC. We read Caps For Sale and asked: Where do caps come from? Some answers were: the cap store, boxes in the basement, or
someone made them using needles and a machine. One person said they knew that the caps came from a factory. We saw a picture of a factory in How We Work.
We played in the big room and we played outside.
We sang The Ants Go Marching. Before quiet time we read The 512 Ants On Sullivan Street, a story about ants working together to get a job done. We watched a few minutes of How It Works and saw a video of a Lego factory. There were many more machines than people. We watched a
few minutes of a jellybean factory too, and saw how the jellybeans are all white before adding brilliant colors.
We read Bears 1 - 10 and saw the bears being cleaned in a washing machine, dyed in barrels of color, and hung out to dry on something similar to our pulley and clothes pins we used in the big room. One person asked how they get the colors for the dye and a classmate explained that it’s similar to dying Easter eggs.
We read Not This Bear! about a boy who was mistaken for a bear.
During movement class with Ms. Z, the children were seen running and sitting. While people moved in the big room we practiced more cutting with scissors. People cut triangles, squares, some teeth, and a couple of hills. Afterward, we ran in the chilly yard and then in the toasty
big room.
Two days this week we went on obstacle courses in the big room. Each day we looked at a map of the course before attempting it. The children had to balance on blocks, crawl under a banana leaf blanket, go through a hoop, crawl over bean bags, roll on mats, and swim across
a pool, all while carrying pretend food. We compared our obstacle course map to the picture of the inside of an ant colony. Is it similar? The children said yes!
Next week we will attempt to make pretend robots in an assembly line. We brainstormed robot ideas with the class. They had all sorts of ideas from talking about robot necklaces to R2D2 to real robots they have at home, and wood robots. They said real robots are made of metal.
We'll see,
Therese