Dear Parents,

The weather kept everyone upbeat and happy this week, so we took advantage of the nice days by having some lessons outdoors in small groups, over by the water fountain.  During circle times, the kids are still stuck on last week’s topic of electricity, so we continued answering questions and listening to their thoughts.  We also got onto some other topics, working on memorizing vocabulary in our sensorial and zoology area.  In general, we were really pleased to see how well our students are able to reflect on topics of discussion, and we also appreciate how they have been working as a team during work cycles.

Sensorial Lessons

Taste Testing: Salty, Bitter & Sweet

During Small groups this week, Miss Carrie gave a lesson on our sense of taste, offering the groups to try out salty water, lemon water, and sugar water.  After each tasting, they were asked to explain what it tasted like, and it was obvious that they were beginning to catch on pretty quickly the differences between salty, sour, bitter, and sweet.  Before they were given these vocabulary words, kids did the best they could to explain what things tasted like.  Their answers are always interesting, to say the least… For example, someone said that the lemon water tasted “tomatoey.”  Each student participated, even when it was time to taste the salty water, which was probably everyone’s least favorite.  All in all, this was a really fun experiment that each student seemed to enjoy.

 Geometric Solids Drawing Lesson

In Angelique’s small groups, we focused on passing around our geometric solids, feeling these 3 dimensional shapes, and recognizing the names of shapes that make the solids.  For example, the rectangular prism has 4 rectangles and two squares.  We played memory games to learn a sphere, cylinder, cone, triangular prism, rectangular prism, cube, triangular based pyramid, square based pyramid, ellipsoid, and an ovoid.  On another day, we reviewed the names and had a drawing lesson that teaches the child to begin looking at the different shapes our eyes see when these objects are viewed at various angles.  First, Angelique took photos of the geometric solids and outlined the shapes on the photos.  She pointed out how shapes look different at different perspectives, for example, when we look at a cylinder just below eye level, the circle on the top can be drawn like an ellipse.  While not every child is going to grasp this concept right away, it got a lot of kids thinking and talking about the shapes they saw.  Many of them practiced drawing shapes while looking at geometric solids.  An additional lesson was given to interested students, training them to notice how the light source plays a role when coloring and shading our geometric solids.

 Zoology Lessons

Animal Classification

We taught a number of lessons this week to help the kids begin to recognize the differences between fish, reptiles, amphibians, mammals, insects, and birds.  We especially emphasized the differences between reptiles and amphibians since these two classes tend to get confusing.  Since we’ve talked about mammals a lot in the past, tour students were usually quick to identify any mammals during memory games.  Speaking of mammals, they were also shown our set of mammal nomenclature cards that labels basic parts of a horse.  Classifying the animal groups is something we will continue to work on, and we will also be getting more into recognizing vertebrates and invertebrates in the near future.

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The kids had plenty of fun this week during work cycles.  Here are some photos to see what they have been up to.  Enjoy the beautiful weather, everyone!