Hour of Code

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Yesterday, Pre-k participated in our second annual “Hour of Code” event.  We didn’t actually spend an hour on the project, but the computer programming that we played with was lots of fun!  The four instructors (Dave Nasar, Dave Piemme and Jonathan Ringer from the Upper and Middle schools and our own Kate Webber) explained that computer programming was a simple as giving someone or something directions.  The students’ first task was to help a wee paper mouse work its way through a maze to a piece of cheese.  Small pieces of paper represented Up, Down, Left and Right.  Each child took turns guiding the mouse along its path.

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As the mazes became progressively more difficult, other “special” commands were introduced.

[vimeo 114038159 w=500 h=281]

After much practice, the children moved on to Kodable, an iPad app with similar parameters.  For this task, the children directed a fuzzy creature through mazes while practicing planning, problem solving, the Scientific Method and visual-spacial skills.

If you are more curious about Hour of Code, check out Computer Science Education Week.  Here is a short introduction found within their site:

We live in a world surrounded by technology. And we know that whatever field our students choose to go into as adults, their ability to succeed will increasingly hinge on understanding how technology works. But only a tiny fraction of us are learning computer science, and less students are studying it than a decade ago.

That’s why schools across the nation joined in on the largest education event in history: The Hour of Code. During Computer Science Education Week (Dec. 8-14), students will be amongst over 2 million worldwide spending one hour learning the basics.

See http://hourofcode.org for details.

The happiness project

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As many of you already know, we have only one rule in the Pre-K classroom: be safe! This rule encompasses all that we do and say throughout the year. It means being safe with our bodies but it also involves being safe with our words and our friends’ feelings. Today, during morning meeting, some of the students had questions about how we can be safe with our friends’ feelings. We started a discussion about how we can “pass” happiness from person to person by using kind words and actions. Just a smile can change someone’s entire day around.

Mrs. Forst and I decided to demonstrate this by spreading happiness (glitter) on our hands and then passing it to a student through our morning greeting. The student then greeted their neighbor, passing on the happiness to yet another friend. Once everyone in our class was able to share in the happiness, we decided that we wanted to share it with the whole school! Our class walked up and down the hallways greeting any teacher or students they saw, passing on the happiness even further. Our hope is that our little bits of happiness and sparkle will spread throughout the whole school and possibility even into our families and community. Have you passed some happiness today?

Mystery Baking!

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There are very few things in the world that are as wonderful as when learning and eating come together as one! Yesterday, our students spent the morning scooping, measuring, mixing, and little bit of tasting. What they were making was a mystery! The recipe consisted of very simple ingredients including flour, butter, salt, sugar, yeast, milk, egg yolk, and cocoa powder. The students excitedly shouted out hypotheses as they observed the changing mixture. These were some of their ideas:

  • cookies
  • oatmeal cookies
  • chocolate chip cookies
  • cake
  • play dough
  • a pillow
  • ice cream
  • eggs
  • bamboo
  • baby panda cookie
  • pizza
  • cupcakes
  • pretzels

 

Once all of the ingredients were added and mixed, we had a dough-like consistency. We then divided the dough into three pieces, adding a cocoa mixture to one, green food coloring to another, and leaving the last one plain. The dough was placed in bowls, covered, and left to rise. In an hour, the dough had doubled and was ready for shaping. We followed the directions; rolling and stretching the dough into a specific shapes and configurations until it was ready for the pan. The mystery loaf took one more hour to rise and then was then placed in the oven at 375 degrees for 30 minutes.

After much anticipation, the mystery dough was baked and ready for the big reveal! Once out of the pan, the delicious smell wafted through the classroom. It was pretty obvious that we had made some sort of bread but we still weren’t sure what kind. The students erupted into a drum roll as we sliced into our mystery pastry and discovered we had made…PANDA BREAD! Although his faced turned out a little squished, it tasted just as yummy!

https://vine.co/v/OJg3vFM9PgY

If you would like to make panda bread too, the recipe and directions can be found here!

http://www.tablespoon.com/recipes/panda-bread/94fb2589-104c-4bb8-8b7f-260f6004cf7e?nicam4=SocialMedia&nichn4=Pinterest&niseg4=Tablespoon&nicreatID4=Post

 

 

The Bamboo Forest

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If you’ve never been in our room in the morning, you might not know of the obsession our class has with pandas. Everyday, pandas are running amok in our loft.  Baby pandas are sleeping, eating and cuddling all morning long. We’ve had pandas star in our journal entries and outdoor play.  We even made a connection with Miss Smith, our Mandarin teacher, when she brought her panda, Meng Meng.

We learned to greet a panda:

[wpvideo iKJd7dHM]

And have been discussing their not-so-varied diet: Bamboo!

Our disheveled loft decorations took a turn for the worse earlier this week and needed to be recycled, so it was looking a little bare (please forgive the pun.)  After looking at the railings for a while, someone noticed that they looked a little bit like a panda’s favorite food.  The only parts that were missing were the leaves.

With the help of a few images culled from Google, leaves quickly began sprouting from our bamboo.  An eager group of scissor wielding leaf designers began a production line of greenery.

111314_6639Branches were designed using pipe cleaners.  All additions were attached using our favorite fixative: tape!  Almost the entire class volunteered for this project.  With so many different jobs to be done, spreading out the work was a cinch.  The largest obstacle we faced was time.  Before we knew it, snack time was upon us.  The children helped me make a “To Do” list to help us continue the project another day.  It contains some curious tasks, but we’ll see how it all shakes out as we go along.

To Do:

  • Panda Food
  • Make a Panda
  • Hang More Leaves
  • Make a Panda Pinata
  • Panda Water
  • Panda Vegetables
  • Panda Bed

As we cleaned up a collection of tiny, green paper slivers began to coalesce. A few students wondered if we could use them for panda food.  I immediately had visions of tiny, green snowflakes raining down all over the classroom, coating the carpet.

Umm, maybe we could find another way to use them as food.

We tried an experiment.  Take one part tiny paper slivers and one part Mod Podge, mix them up gently with your fingers and let them dry on waxed paper over night.  The next morning, you will have a lovely, stay-in-one-place panda meal. It worked perfectly.

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What happens to garbage?

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Our students are currently conducting an experiment to see what happens to garbage when it gets buried beneath the soil. They have placed a tomato, pepper, leaf, and plastic grocery bag in a clear compost container and covered each item with dirt. The students will be observing and  journaling about the decomposing process, or lack there of, over the course of several weeks.

 

 

https://vine.co/v/OM21F1pnQvQ

Persistence

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Have you ever watched a baby conduct a social experiment? You know, the kind where he/she drops a spoon from the high chair nine thousand times during breakfast. That is persistence.  It can also be quite frustrating for the adult involved.  However, the baby is quite content to drop the spoon over and over and over.  He/She is learning many things during this activity.

  • Spoons always fall down.
  • Somebody will pick up the spoon and return it.
  • When the spoon drops, people make sounds.
  • The spoon did not disappear off the face of the planet.
  • Falling spoons make people smile/cry/yell/giggle/pull hair from their heads.

Imagine the baby only dropped the spoon once.  What would be learned? How many connections to the effects of a fallen spoon would the child be able to make?  The answer is not many.

A magnetic marble maze.
A magnetic marble maze.

Our brains learn through making connections.  We connect new stimuli to memories of previous experiences. We connect current information to the current input from our senses.  (How do we feel? What do we smell? What is our emotional climate during this experience?)  As we interact we connect possible ideas, or hypotheses, to present circumstances.

Supporting all of this thinking is a willingness to continue to experiment even in the face of mistakes.  This is persistence.  Babies don’t think twice about attempting the same action ad infinitum.  It is only later, around four years of age, that we begin to see our selves as “not good” at certain things. We begin to believe that only those with “talent” can accomplish a task.

Spent the entire morning peeling this walnut with her bare hands.
Spent the entire morning peeling this walnut with her bare hands.

In Pre-K we are right on the edge of that bubble.  Many of the children still believe that they can learn anything.  We want to encourage that feeling because the truth is, they can.  Anything we wish to do well requires practice.  Persisting at daunting activities must be practiced, as well.  We must allow children the opportunity to face low-risk failure (a puzzle piece doesn’t fit, a friend gets angry, the milk is spilled, it turns out that 20, 30, 60, 40 is not how you count) now.  The price is not high and they can easily make another attempt. With practice, persistence will remain second nature.

Leaf Sort

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Our interest in leaves last week inspired a throw-back morning message today.  Four leaves were featured and we encouraged the children to support their choices with evidence.  Some noticed that a leaf was a different shape or had a different proliferation of spots.  Others pointed out the color differences.  We were interested in finding many ways to group even a small selection of items.

Once we had experience with finding a single difference, we expanded the activity to combining like items to make sets.

The children invented the “rules” for these set circles.

The "not spikey" leaves.
The “not spiky” leaves.
The "spikey" leaves.
The “spiky” leaves.

The problem occurred when our final leaf was placed in the “not spiky” set.  A few children disagreed about the general “spikiness” of the long, fern-like leaf.  It looked “spiky” in its overall profile, but each individual leaf was actually rounded.

The children decided that it must go in both circles.

This one is both spikey and not spikey.
This one is both spiky and not spiky.

As you can see, another difficulty arose.  If the leaf was in-between the circles, it was in neither group.  If it was creating a bridge between the circles, it was partly in both circles.

What if we place it so it hangs in both circles.
What if we place it so it hangs in both circles.

It took a bit of playing with the string, but they did discover that if they overlapped the string, it would make a section for a leaf with both attributes.

Will it fit in this intersection?
Will it fit in this intersection?
Now we have a diagram that explains how our leaves fit together.
Now we have a diagram that explains how our leaves fit together.

Beans: They’re good for your fine motor skills!

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091914_5192Our sensory, or touch, table made its first appearance the other day.  It is filled with colored beans.  I actually prepped the table the first full week of school, but haven’t had the opportunity to introduce it to the class.  In true Responsive Classroom style, we used guided discovery to find out more about the new materials.  As you can see in the picture above, the class did an amazing job of following directions and listening with their whole bodies as I explained the basics of the bin.  Here we are touching them for the first time:

[wpvideo bLgiFO6U]

A few moments later, beans were flying, giggles ensued and happiness permeated the atmosphere.  The children were measuring beans into containers, placing individual beans in upside-down funnels and creating flavor concoctions.

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Build your own game

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The weather has been lovely this week.  The temperatures are moderate and the rain is holding back.  Our outdoor classrooms are in use constantly.  In between treks in the woods and stories on the rock, we break down for a bit of good-old-fashioned, shake-it-out play.

While looking for a soccer ball the other day, two boys happened upon a small ball and a tube we set out for a ramp/tunnel.  We (being closed-minded, non-imaginative, grown-ups) suggested that they could throw the ball and try to catch it.  They had other plans.

[wpvideo TxGXlg2h]

Not sure what learning you are seeing? Try these on:

  • Creative Use of Materials
  • Motor Planning
  • Arm/Hand/Implement Coordination
  • Problem Solving
  • Abstract Thought
  • Representational Play
  • Conflict Management
  • Patience
  • Self-Regulation
  • Mentoring Other Students
  • The Art of Compromise