This week was transportation week and we've had a blast! Several of the kids have been asking to learn about race cars and fire trucks so we decided to spent a week learning about different forms of transportation. We waited to do our exploring this week since the school had Vehicle Day on Tuesday. It worked out perfectly! We were able to read books and learn more about the vehicles that came to school and well as others that we were curious about.
For Vehicle Day our school closed off half of the parking lot for us to explore different types of vehicles. We were able to see a 4-wheeler, dump truck, fire truck, ambulance, hand made race car, and a moving truck. The kids were able to walk around to each vehicle and have someone talk about it and ask questions. We learned a lot and the kids asked some really detailed questions! One of our students even asked the fire fighters how they go "potty" when they're all dressed up and in the middle of a fire. The fire fighters thought this was hilarious and admitted that that question was a first for them! We were able to the see a dump truck bed move up and down and a fire fighter dress in his gear. We were also able to sit on a 4-wheeler and inside the ambulance and race car. I think their favorite part was going inside of the moving truck (aka "Max's dad's truck"). We were able to ride the lift up and down and then dance around in the back of the truck. They loved it! Afterwards we participated in the Passing of the Cans that our school does each year. Every student lined up throughout the halls and we passed cans from one end of the school to the other and loaded them into the moving truck. Once all the cans were passed, we went outside and sat in the grass to watch them load up and ride away. It was a crazy, fun-filled day for all of us! We spent some time later that day talking about what we saw and what we enjoyed the most. Here are some little quotes from each kid after being asked, "What was your favorite vehicle today?"....
John Adam: "My favorite is the moving tuck because there is lots of room."
Ashton: "My favorite is the ambulance because my dad drives one."
David: "The moving truck because it goes up and down."
Vedh: "Rohan's dad's car because I like steering wheel and it goes fast!"
Jacob: "My favorite is the fire truck because of all the equipment and stuff."
Finn: "The moving truck because I liked the dance party in it!"
Asa: "My favorite is the moving truck because you step on and someone pushes a button and you move up."
Kifer: "The race car and moving truck because they can do something so cool."
Zeke: "The fire truck because it had all the cool equipment."
John Walter: "My favorite is the fire truck because the man dressed up as a fireman."
Sadie: "Rohan's dad's race car because it looked cool."
Max: "My favorite is my dad's moving truck because it was like a dance party!"
Owen: "Max's dad's moving truck because we went up and had a big party in it."
Kingston: "The race car. It fast!"
As we explored these vehicles we noticed that they each had different types of wheels. The difference in the wheels also made us realize that their tracks would be different as well. To show the difference in tracks we decided to do some painting with cars! The kids were able to roll different types of cars through paint colors and make marks on their paper. We were able to see the different tracks and make some pretty cool designs! We also did some road building this week. We printed off several different types of roads (short, long, curvy, round-abouts, and intersections). The kids spent some time building their own roads and then driving on them with our cars. Some of the kids made their own small roadway, while others worked in groups to build large roadways that took up the whole rug. The kids really got into this so we are keeping these road pieces out as a permanent addition to our centers.
We also spent some time this week working on our big project - building our own form of transportation! We have collected so many different things for our creation station that we were able to use those supplies to build our pieces. The kids could build any form of transportation that they wanted. They had to get creative in making these and I was impressed! They used paper to cover their creations and tape to stick everything together. We let each child take as much time as they wanted to work on their creation. We saw everything from rocket ships to motor cycles. Some of them based their creations off of vehicles that we saw at school, while others made up something completely different. We talked with the kids about their vehicles throughout the whole process and wrote down their thoughts about what they made. You'll find their quotes under their creation on the table in the hallway. Feel free to pick them up and check them out! They're so proud of them :)
I'm sure most of you have already heard, but we are going to try to hatch some chicks in our classroom! We are going to start the incubation process in our classroom on Tuesday. It takes 21 days for the eggs to hatch so hopefully we'll have some chicks for the last week of school! Some of you have asked about taking a chick after they hatch. If you think you'd like to, or know someone who would like one, just let us know. We aren't sure how many we'll have but hopefully at least half of them will hatch! You'll be hearing all about our process through newsletters but I did want to let everyone know since we've started getting lots of questions about them. We so excited to end our school year this way!
Approaches to Learning
- Demonstrate growing ability to predict possible outcomes based on prior experiences and knowledge.
- Demonstrate increasing ability to use prior knowledge to understand new experiences.
- Represent prior events and personal experiences in one or more ways.
- Understand a task can be accomplished through several steps.
- Interact easily with familiar adults by engaging in conversations, responding to questions and following directions.
- Participate in group life of class.
- Develop friendship with one or town preferred children.
- Display emerging social skills of trying to take turns and talk with others during play.
- Demonstrate strategies to join play group with adult support.
- Carry out simple directions and directives.
- Complete a thought or idea when communicating with others.
- Classify objects and information by observable attributes into predetermined categories.
- Begin to use classroom resources such as books, charts, photographs and graphs to gain information about topics of interest.
- Represent familiar people and experiences through art and language.
- Combine some letters with pretend writing.
- Begin to understand the relationship between oral language and written language.
- Organize and represent data with real objects.
- Compare the lengths of two objects.
- Understand and use positional words to describe the location of objects.
- Identify the positions first through tenth using concrete objects.
- Compare sets of no more than ten objects using the terms "more than" or "same as".
- Begin to show an awareness of numbers in the environment.
We had a great day checking out vehicles and passing cans!...
Painting with cars...
Constructing our vehicles and roads...
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