Thursday, November 12, 2009

November 12th, 2009

We are beginning to slowly wrap up our study of fall, leaves and the forest.

Today, we used guided imagery to imagine ourselves as small seedlings buried in the ground. We pushed through the ground to become small saplings. Some of the trees thought pushing up through the ground was difficult, because the ground they were planted in was frozen, and some of us found it easy to sprout, as the ground they were planted in had been muddied and softened by rain. "It felt good under ground. It was funner. I could feel the dirt. It was easy (to come out of the ground) because it was muddy and the snow was on it for a long time and there were a whole lot of animals. The animals helped me dig out of the hole." -Jacob



When we moved into the world, we felt the sun on our faces and felt the cool air.



As the seasons changed, so did we! We grew stronger and stronger and eventually grew apples on our branches.


Along came some children. The children picked our apples and enjoyed the fruit. When that happened, we felt happy, because we knew that we would one day grow fruit again.


"It felt dangerous for me underground, it didn't feel good for me. I was going to die. The ground was so sticky for me because it was covered with mud. Then I scrubbed the mud off and I stretched out more. Then I dumped the apples. My arms was hurting. When the kids picked the apples it felt good. My arms were starting to break. Then I was feeling much better."
-Lhitzy

In Creative Play, we put the tissue paper leaves we had made last Thursday on our forest trees. The trees are looking full now, and provide protection, shade and a home for us as we pretended to be squirrels and other forest creatures.


In Atelier, we practiced our fine motor skills and further studied the shapes of leaves and what trees they represented by sewing burlap leaves with large needles and yarn. Every child was able to identify maple, oak and poplar leaves just by their shape!


We learned to thread our needles....


and make small stitches, pulling the thread all the way through.


We went up and down with our needles.






Here is Iris sharing what sewing means to her:



After rest time, we took the real leaves we sorted on Tuesday and organized them into a pictograph. We made observations such as how many leaves we had all together, how many more fir branches we had than maple leaves, if any amount was equal to another amount etc. We talked about the concepts of more than and less than, as well as discussed what the amount of leaves in our graph could tell us about how common certain trees are in our community.



Some of us were wondering earlier about alligators and crocodiles. Jacob hypothesized that alligators never ate people, but crocodiles did. We decided to research that hypothesis on Google. We thought of a question ("Do alligators eat people?"), and used the internet to find the answer.


We found out that while alligators do eat people once in a while, they are less aggressive than crocodiles and won't eat people unless provoked. Crocodiles are more likely to eat larger mammals, such as people. We were surprised that our hypothesis wasn't entirely correct!


5 comments:

  1. Dear Dolphins,

    Thank you for a great day outside. I love teacher. Thank you for teaching me and being in my class. Thank for going on a leaf hunt.

    Goodbye,
    Ty

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Dolphins,
    It sounds like you did so much today. I was excited to hear about your guided imagery, it sounds like it was fun. I enjoyed seeing all the tissue paper leaves on our tree. Can you tell me more about the leaf sewing activity? What was the most challenging part of doing the sewing?

    Thanks,
    Mr. Mark

    ReplyDelete
  3. Dear Mr. Mark,
    The hardest part of sewing was the needle. Also putting the thread back in the needle. It was hard. Love, Jacob

    Dear Mr. Mark,
    The hardest thing of sewing was sewing into the leaf. Sometimes we sewed so close to the end of the leaf it ripped. So we just got another one. Love, Sam R.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Dear Ty,
    We love you. We miss you when you're gone. Did you notice that the leaf kinda ripped when we did it too close to the end? Love, Sam Rueder.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Dear Ms. Katie,
    Dolphins love you. Sometimes we fall down in the mud and we get all dirty. Did you know that sometimes when we sewed the leaves we ripped the leaf. We had lots of fun outside! Love, Sam Rueder

    ReplyDelete