Ramps and Races!

Hello family and friends!

What a fun and busy week we've had! After over a month, it looks like we have wrapped up our block exploration. We've stayed busy and have learned so much! This all started when the kids wanted to learn about skyscrapers. Our time planning and building was a blast.! From skyscrapers we ended up taking a closer look at blocks by measuring and comparing sizes and shapes. We also spent some time in the exploration of mazes (which may have been my favorite!). I was amazed at some of the mazes they built. All of that led to us to this week, our exploration of ramps!

To start our week, we made a special gift for Harley. As I'm sure all of you know by now, Harley and her family are moving and today was her last day with us. While Harley wasn't at school on Monday, we worked on making her a book to take with her on her move. Each of us drew a special picture and said a message for her. The kids had so much fun doing this and the fact that we had to keep it a surprise until Friday made it even more exciting for the them. I took a picture of each page for you to look through. They were just too sweet not to share. We also had a special pajama day per Harley's request. Friday was a sweet day of celebrating friendships and loving on our sweet Harley!

Throughout the rest of the week we focused on ramps. To start, we had some discussions about ramps...what were they, why they are shaped the way that they are, where we see them in our world, what would roll down a ramp, and what are their different purposes? After some time exploring these questions, we laid 4 different types of balls in the middle of the carpet...a volleyball, a hard plastic ball, a soft rubber bouncy ball, and a marble. We split the class into groups and they each explored the different balls. Later, we met and each group gave us facts about them. This got us talking about the way balls bounce. We decided to test out which ball would bounce the highest. We took predictions beforehand and wrote them out on a chart. Then, we tested out our predictions in the classroom. We made a mark on the wall and then had the kids drop each of the balls from that same height. We discussed the importance of not throwing it down...we wanted our results to be as accurate as possible so we each did a simple drop. After each drop we marked the wall with the highest bounce point and finally discovered that the rubber bouncy ball bounced back the highest! We marked our findings on our chart.

Next, we wanted to see which ball would roll the fastest down a ramp. We decided to use the big ramp in the school (leading to the synagogue). We were hoping to do this outside but the rain kept us in...it was fun either way! To start, we made more predictions and charted them. We decided the best way to test this would be to have several different races. We started by calling 2 kids to the top of the ramp and they each chose one ball of their choice. We kept doing these 2 on 2 races until each ball had raced all the others. We also placed a helper at the bottom of the ramp to judge the race and collect our run away balls. After individual races, we pulled all 4 balls to the top of the ramp and had one large final race. Before I disclose the results, I want to paint a little picture in your head. We had all the kids lined up down one side of the ramp for viewing, and 2 kids at the top with a ball in their hands. There was jumping and chanting and screaming and cheering...I had no idea they would get this ecstatic. It was hilarious to say the least! We all thoroughly enjoyed ourselves :) We lined the balls on the starting line and discovered that the marble was definitely the fastest!

We also spent some time making our own ramps. We reviewed the basic design of ramps before starting, and then let the kids work with their peers. Most of them chose to build ramps with blocks...which worked great! They worked beautifully together and got so creative. Many of them were full of obstacles with several different pathways. After we constructed our ramps, we used our different balls to see how they worked. Some groups found out that their ramps needed to be tweaked after experimenting with the balls. It was a lot of trial and error, but so much fun!

To wrap up our awesome week, we had our intern, Ms. Daizha, do her first planned lesson with the kids. They enjoy having her in the room so much and she is amazing with them. She started by reading a book called, "Layla's Head Scarf". Throughout the story she talked with the kids about our differences and how we can be kind and respectful to one another. It was a great opportunity for us to talk about being kind and caring for those who look and dress differently than we do. After reading, we spent time writing and drawing Layla, the main character, a kind letter to encourage her. These kiddos are so sweet. They were careful to use words that we uplifting and encouraging and drew pictures full of friends and hearts. It was a great lesson and we're so excited for our next one with Ms. Daizha!

We're looking forward to another great week!

Love,
Ms. Rachael



Approaches to Learning:

• Demonstrate delight or satisfaction when completing a task, solving a problem, or making a discovery.
• Demonstrate growing initiative in selecting and carrying out activities.
• Show increasing ability to maintain interest in self-selected activities and play despite distractions and interruptions.
• Understand a task can be accomplished through several steps.

Social & Emotional:

• Demonstrate self direction by making choices among peers, activities and materials.
• Demonstrate confidence by participating in most classroom activities.
• Respond respectfully to positive and negative feedback from adults most of the time.
• Follow classroom rules and procedures with reminders.
• Use classroom materials responsibility, most of the time.

Language & Literacy:

• Make relevant comments or appropriate responses to story events or characters.
• Distinguish between descriptions of story events and spoken words of characters.
• Retell one or two events from a story read aloud.
• Begin to identify significant words from text read aloud.
• Incorporate favorite parts of literary texts into play activities.
• Explore books independently.

Mathematics:

• Investigate solutions to simple problems.
• Use emergent mathematical knowledge as a problem-solving tool.
• Use appropriate vocabulary to communicate mathematical ideas.
• Integrate mathematical ideas into personal representations.
• Compare sets of no more than ten objects using the terms "more than" or "same as".
• Associate at least two measurement devices with their purposes.

Making our delicious challah bread with Morah Devorah...

 

Working in groups to explore and make predictions...

 

Working on our drop experiment...

 

Ramp racing and building! Our favorite part of the week...

Enjoying our lesson with Ms. Daizha...

 

Experimenting with head scarves like we read about in our book...

 

Working on our book for Harley...



 

Our finished product! We love you and miss you, Harley!

 
 
Pajama Day!