Planting Seeds

As Spring approaches the children helped us to get a head start on planting seeds for in our garden. Our plan is to grow the seeds inside in our "greenhouse" until it is warm enough to plant them outside. The kids were very excited! We asked them, "What should we plant in our garden?" Their responses were: sunflower, roses, cucumber, green beans, peppers, tomatoes. The next step was to ask the children, "What do you know about plants?" They drew their response on a white board and shared it with the class.

We then got down to planting. The green house came with dirt pods. We needed to first add water to the pod to make it grow before we could put the seeds into the dirt. The children worked their fine motor skills by squeezing drops of water onto the pod with pipettes. 

 

Then we had to wait! All of the seeds were planted, labeled and closed up in the greenhouse. Here is how they grew!

Day 1

Day 3

Day 6

Ms. Schmidt's Newsletter

Exploring the Sports of the Winter Olympics

Winter Olympics

For the last two weeks we have been learning about the Olympics. We showed the children videos of all of the different sports. We also showed them the medals and how each Olympics have a different design on their medal. The children then created their own gold, silver and bronze medals. Some children even brought in medals from home to share. We have enjoyed this experience and are seeing it connect to other things we are doing in the classroom. The most popular sport was definitely bobsledding. We will continue to explore the idea of building a bobsled as it develops through the children's play. 

Sending people down the luge

We froze people in ice then send them down an old gutter. The children loved seeing how fast the people moved. 

Building a Bobsled

The children have been very excited about bobsledding. They used the large blocks to make a big enough bobsled for everyone to fit in. They would watch the video and say, "Ahhhhhhh" as the bobsled went down the ice. They also moved their bodies like the people in the sled

Ice Hockey

To explore the idea of ice hockey, the children build goals out of blocks and used tubes as their sticks. They worked together with their team to score the ball into the goal. Hannah was the goalie for the one side and she guarded the goal. The other children moved the ball with the stick trying to score. 

Curling

To get the children thinking about curling, we made a target on the floor just like they do for the sport. The children threw bean bags on the target. They then used number sentences to add up their point to see who got the highest score. 

Skiing

This was one of the favorites for our class. We showed the kids a video of downhill skiing. They then used the flat blocks as their skis and tubes as their poles. They glided around the block area and moved their bodies like the athletes on the mountain.