E Day Was Smokin' Hot!

"Oh My!" you say.  "A fire in the school????"

Yep, well sort of....

Our day started with some sparks....  Sparks of creativity that is....

The students were given a paper with a few squiggly lines and shapes.  Their task was to create a cohesive picture incorporating all of the lines and shapes.  They could rotate their paper as much as they wished in order to find the desired orientation.  Squiggles are more than just a cute art project.  These tasks exercise and strengthen the students' creative problem solving skills: fluency, flexibility, originality and elaboration.

 

I encourage the students to think of many possible pictures and then see if they can choose a theme for their picture that is original within our class.  They have to be very flexible in their thinking to incorporate all of the given lines and shapes.  Once their picture begins to take shape, they must pay attention to detail and be as elaborative as possible.  (These same skills can be used when they are writing a creative story or solving a real world problem.)  The more they strengthen these skills, the more creative they will be.  Today we had an outer space scene, a view of the inside of a beauty shop, an alien attack scene, a camping trip, undersea scenes and several others.  ask your child to share their own squiggle with you.  Have them tell you what they did well, what was easy and what was challenging about this project.

 

Once I had their brains smoldering and sparking from our creative workout, I added in a little oxygen to achieve a flame, Ollie Oxygen, that is....

Ollie Oxygen is our latest Quirkle and today we learned that fire needs oxygen to burn.  

After reading our picture book and listing our new vocabulary words,  we conducted our experiment.  The students wrote a hypothesis for our problem:  Which candle will go out first when we limit the oxygen supply of each? In our experiment, I lit three small candles.  I carefully covered each with a glass container of varying size.  The students recorded their observations and wrote our class conclusion.  Ask your child to share their science log with you.

After lunch and recess, we headed off to our next destination.  This adventure kept us on the continent of North America.  The students and I traveled far to the north, to the home of the Inuit people: Canada.  In our folktale, Tuk the Hunter,  we discovered some of the dangers faced by the Inuit people as they hunt to provide for their family.  

We also learned the Inuit do not waste any part of the animals they hunt.  For our project, the students are making a class book, Waste Not, Want Not.   This week they brainstormed ways we can reuse and recycle trash items.  Next week, we will work to finish our book.

The students ended their day with a little Spanish number/color BINGO with Senora Gates.  What a fun way to practice your Spanish vocabulary!

It was a busy day and their enthusiasm spread like fire, but in the end, the only smokey smells in our room came from our little candles.

Have a great week!