Maple Room News
May 11 - May 15
An Ongoing Study of Space
Children moved quickly to rocket ships, distant planets, and black holes.
Most recently, the children studying space have been extremely interested in the animals who have risked their lives for the pursuits of science. Albert II was the first chimpanzee to exit our little blue planet. Several children have been researching Albert. They spent time this past week sculpting and painting Albert in a variety of outfits, conditions and moods. The sculptures are inspirational, and currently on display outside of our classroom.
What's happening at the nail center?
Last week when two students visited the nail salon, they were really curious about how the salon opened. One student asked the owner this question.
Q: How did you open the nail salon?
A: I needed to save a lot of money.
The Maples realized that they don’t have a lot of money… One student offered to save all of their money and bring it in, but we decided to work together to earn the money. “How much money do we need?”
The group decided that they would need $104. “But, how are we going to get it?”
"I have an idea...let's make paper money--paper dollars. And we can make them look really realistic."
"Yeah, and we can give each class the same amount of money, so they can all buy stuff."
Here are the ideas that we came up, so that the nail center can earn $104:
· Have a lemonade stand
· Sell things that we don’t need (old toys, clothes, books)
· Sell food (cookies, cupcakes, Chinese food)
· Make bracelets and necklaces
But first...we have to learn how to paint nails. This group chose construction paper that matched their skin colors. We traced our hands and made sure to draw the fingernails. Once we had several hand templates, we watched a YouTube video about painting nails. A woman taught us a very interesting technique: dot, push, pull, side, and side. This is how you paint each nail.
We practiced on our paper hand templates.
Stay tuned...
A Study of Gardens
Shai eating plums alongside his brother in their backyard garden.
Finn is running with a life-sized stuffed tiger. He's on the way to pull radishes.
A real life gardener is sharing his knowledge with the Maples.
You can compose music in a garden!
Galloping through Violet's backyard garden.
Dana talks to us about raising chickens in the city.
Reading Workshop
We also practiced using old and new reading strategies:
Readers use the first letters and first part of the word to figure out what it could be. When you use the first part, you need to still ask yourself, “Does it make sense?”
Just like when readers use the first part of the word, they also use the end of the words to make sure that they are reading the correct word. You can say the sound the last letter makes. There are also special endings that many words have like -ed and -ing.
Once you feel like you have figured out the tricky word, you should always ask yourself, “Does that sound right” and “Does that make sense?”
Some of us have realized that using our fingers to point to each word makes our reading sound really choppy...like a robot.Did you know that you can use your eyes to point to each word as you read...and it doesn’t make your reading sound choppy. Our reading sounds just like talking.
Our sight words this week: very, could
Writing Workshop
This week in writing workshop, we learned about watermelon and seed stories. A watermelon story is really big and juicy-- it is filled with lots of different events. If you zoom into a watermelon story, you will find many different seeds...these seeds tell one specific event or story. We practiced writing seed stories that focus on one small moment. We have many different seed stories that we can write about the events from our own lives.
At home with your Maple you can practice telling a BIG watermelon story, and then zooming in and finding all of the seed stories within in.
Trip To MOMA
Our first escalator ride as a class!
Looking at and responding to art.
Feeling inspired by Matisse.
We had a wonderful time visiting the MOMA and the surrounding area in the city. The Maples were eager to look at pieces of artwork after they had a pre-visit lesson a few weeks ago. They predicted that they would see sculptures, paintings, and collages.
Once we got to the museum, we split into different groups and visited various exhibits. Some of us spent some time looking at a sculpture that was hanging from the ceiling. It moved and changed its shape and we continued to look at it. A few of us observed that the sculpture looked like a yellow submarine, while others thought it resembled a shark. It was interesting to view the piece of artwork in different ways. We then drew sketches of one part of the sculpture.
Another group visited the Matisse exhibit. We observed a large collage composed by Matisse. This particular collage was composed in response to Matisse's heartache at not being able to swim in his later years. Matisse was chair bound in later years following a bout with abdominal cancer and surgery.
Following our visit to the galleries, we toured the museum's sculpture garden. Wait, an outdoor space filled with sculpture is called a sculpture garden?
The children worked to compose collages of their own, pushing misshapen pieces of blue paper across a slick wooden floor.
We enjoyed our lunch in Pasley Park and had a musical ride back to school (the Maples organically joined together to sing some of their favorite songs: Blackbird, If You Want to Sing Out, This Pretty Planet, We Are the World. What a subtle and beautiful display of classroom culture and pride.