Pumpkin Investigation. As you already know, for the past four weeks, we have been recording the observations on our rotting pumpkin. We noticed that the color has changed from light brown and yellowish colors to dark brown, white, and black. The texture has changed as well. The skin has turned mushy and slimy and on the inside white part looks fuzzy. The pumpkin has lost its smile and we cannot see any more teeth; it does not look happy anymore. Some say it seems angry; others say it looks sad or even scared. I think it looks like all of them at the same time. The smell also changed from fresh to moldy, or garbage, as the kids say.

We will keep our pumpkin as long as we can to watch it change. 

 Christmas tree. On our way back to school from the park, we found a big branch on the ground. Students asked if we could bring it back to school. 

T-“Of course we can, but what are we going to do with it?”

S1-“Oh, I know! We could decorate it!”, 

T-“How can we decorate it?” 

S1-“We can paint it and put ornaments on it!”

T-“Where are we going to find the ornaments?”

S2-“We can make it ourselves!”

S3-“We can make leaves like the ones on the windows.”

S4-“…and put on lights!”

And that’s how we started. We painted our branch white. Students were so excited they finished in one morning!. I was very excited too. By the afternoon, the branch had already dried, they were ready to decorate it, but we had one little problem: how do we make it stand? I told them we needed to move it around the room in case we needed to do an activity in that area. The ideas started rolling: 

“Let’s just tape it on the table,” “We could glue it on the floor,” “We could dig a hole on the ground,” “We should bring mud and put it on the floor”, “We can hang it on the ceiling!” 

All great ideas and we discussed one by one, “Are we going to be able to move it around after we glue it? Tape it? Hang it on the ceiling? Can we even dig a hole on the ground inside of our classroom?” After thinking and thinking, a student yelled: “Let’s just put it in a cup so we can move it!” mmmm, okay, let’s try that idea. We found a cup and tried. “It’s too small!” So we started looking for cups of all sizes around our room. We lined them up from smaller to bigger, and we tried one by one. We even found a vase that kind of looks like a cup. We tried the vase; it looked like it would work, the vase was heavy, but the branch kept going sideways. We discussed that the branch needed something to hold it at the bottom. “We need something heavy,” “Water” “Mud.” Someone mentioned that their mom put water in a vase for flowers. We tried with water, but what about if someone spills it?. “Mud!” We were back to the mud talking. Okay, let’s go get mud outside. We found soil, but not mud. They looked for stuff that could be heavy as well; some brought pine cones, others brought leaves, and some found rocks. We brought it back to the classroom and compared them with each other; the heaviest ones were the soil and the rocks, so we put them in the vase. We tested it and…Hooray! Our tree was standing! We put the lights on, and we made the ornaments. We were so proud of our tree.

(We observed, analyzed, reflected, evaluated the situation, made decisions, and solved a problem. This is the way we practice our Critical Thinking skills).

 Leaf-O-Land. With all the leaves we’ve been collecting in our leaf hunts, we decided to make leaf people. We created Leaf-O-Land, as they called the land where the leaves live. We used our imagination to give life to our leaves, we named them and we sent our leaf people to great adventures and dictated them in our journals. We made sure that our main character had some conflict that they needed to resolve. This is the way we learn the parts of a story: character, setting, plot, conflict, theme. (Ask your child the name of his/her leaf character and the incredible adventure they had. 

 Taste Test Challenge. We have tasted a new fruit every week. And Tejocote was a strange fruit for all of the students; after we tasted it, they described the flavor. Tejocote was not as sweet as it usually is, and students found the flavor and texture close to an apple. When I brought the Tejocote last week, we found that they were not ripped, so we waited a few days. They watched it going from green and yellow to dark yellow, orange and red. We noticed that the yellow color from the inside was changing incredibly fast to a light brown then to a dark brown after we cut it. This caught our attention more than its flavor. We talked about what happens to bananas and apples after we cut them or peel them, and they all have noticed that they turn brown. But this time, we could see it in speed time, as it was happening right in front of our eyes. We talk about Oxidation; when the oxygen in the air we breathe comes in contact with the fruit’s pulp, the color changes to a brown or dark brown. We talked about how apples and bananas also have the same reaction. We wondered what other fruits or maybe even veggies change color once they are cut or peeled. That could be an exploration for the future. For now, we went back to recording our new information in our class graph. Many thumbs up this time, yay!!!

 Library Zoom Visit. Ms. Stephanie from the Des Plaines Library visited on Tuesday morning. She brought a beautiful story and sang songs with us over zoom. Something different that we all enjoyed. We read the books Fall Mixed Up by Bob Raczka and Fletcher and the Falling Leaves by Julia Rawlinson (Ask your child what story was his/her favorite).

This week was all about science. Students have been working on observational experiments, making predictions, talking about possible outcomes and recording our findings by drawing and “writing” our data. They realized that some experiments take time and to see results we need to be very patient, like with our Pumpkin experiment, it has been three weeks and we are still working on the last stages of this experiment. (Ask your child what is happening to our pumpkin so far).

A lot of conversations about our teeth lately. Not long ago, some students had their dentist appointments, others had their first or second teeth falling off.  We remembered that our teeth are stronger than our bones, however, they still need special care. We wrote down what we already know to keep our teeth healthy: we need to brush and floss our teeth, twice a day, for at least 2 minutes each time. We learned that paying attention to what we eat is as important as brushing, and to see it with our own eyes we had an experiment.  We talked about how our teeth are made of the same basic stuff (calcium) as eggshells, and so we could soak some eggs in our favorite beverages to see what would happen to them over time. The hard shell of an egg protects the soft parts inside, just like the hard enamel on our teeth protects the soft and tender pulp on the inside. Both eggshells and teeth are made of calcium, a hard white substance that also makes up our bones. We made predictions as to what would happen to the eggs, then we waited. We checked our eggs after 24 hours.  The results were striking. Students really got the idea that most of our favorite drinks are harmful to our teeth. But, what do all of them have in common? Sugar! Sugar and acids are very harmful to our teeth. Acids actually dissolve the enamel, giving bacteria an inroad to begin decaying it, and sugar promotes decay (cavities). The bottom line is that the sugar, color, and acids in our drinks harm our teeth, and those effects are exacerbated by poor brushing habits. So what should we do? “Don’t drink them!” Well,  we will eventually drink a delicious hot cocoa,  a refreshing gatorade or a yummy fruit juice, but it is important to brush our teeth thoroughly after.  We took this experiment a step further by brushing the eggs with a toothbrush and  toothpaste to see how much of the stain can be removed from the egg and how much is left. Students were very excited and they brushed gently so they wouldn’t break the egg.  It took a lot longer than we thought to clear away the stain, and we found that even after brushing, the egg was not the same white as it was before. (Ask your child which beverage was the only one that did not stain the egg and why). Just for the fun of it, we put the eggs back in the liquids, what can happen in the next two days? 

Maps. This week, we talked about the importance of knowing the emergency exit routes. In case of an emergency we need to know the safe way to evacuate our room/school. We talked about the importance of remembering which one is our primary exit plan, and what to do in case we need to exit quickly.  We took a little tour to remind the students of the rooms around ours, the main hallway (which we usually use) and identified the rooms: office, kitchen, bathrooms, gym, and janitor’s closet. Together we created an evacuation map on the white board, locating the rooms and exits we had just talked about.  Using maps is a great way to strengthen children’s spatial reasoning skills, it allows them to picture the location of objects, their shapes, their relations to each other and the paths we take as we move.  We discussed that first responders such as firefighters or police may also use the emergency exits to enter a building during a fire for example, so we needed to identify our secondary exit from our classroom and our school building. We discussed the possibilities of having our main exit blocked: What would we do next? How would we get out of the building? We would  need an alternative route and exit in that case. We then located the second exit, they are familiarized with it because it’s the one we use to go to our outdoor classes. We were all very interested and decided to create a map of our own. Check them out!

Our Vote counts! All this talking about an “Election” around us generates many questions. What’s an election? What’s a vote? What’s a ballot? What does Democracy mean? So many “big” words! While they’re too young to fully understand the formality of the electoral process, they’re not clueless. They are learning about the world around them and who is in it. A simple voting activity in class teaches them the voting process, that each of them has an opinion and that their vote (voice) counts. To answer those questions we had our very own “election”. First we made two different flavors of jello, strawberry and lime. Students remembered the ingredients and the whole process from the last time we made it. They also remembered that the gelatin powder and the water made a solution and not a suspension. Once we were done, we put them in the fridge. They expressed their favorite flavor and how much they loved jello. The next day I told them we were going to taste our jello, however, we were only going to taste only one of the flavors and not both. “I want strawberry!, I want lime!” Well, to solve our problem, we needed to have an “election”. Each of us had a ballot, and each of us had a chance to vote. The choice of what flavor jello we’d have was going to affect them in a real way, so they took their vote seriously. I encouraged them to vote in privacy because voting is special and I also wanted the results to be a surprise. They folded the ballot and put it in the official box. We then counted the votes and it was 5-4 for strawberry jello. I explained that Democracy meant we were going to respect the choice of the majority of our classmates. At the end, we all enjoyed delicious strawberry jello. 

Continuing with the question: Who invented Candy? We discussed what they had understood from the video they watched at home from Mystery Science. We talked about how “candy” or sweets were just fruits and honey a long time ago, and how they discovered sugar. I was lucky enough to find  sugar cane at the store and I brought it to school. What is it? “A stick!. It looks like panda food. It’s bamboo!” They were not wrong, the sugar cane does look like a stick, a big stick! We measured it using unifix cubes and measuring tape. It was long, 59 inches long and students compared themselves with the cane. “It’s definitely shorter than you Ms. Soraya!”  We examined it using all our senses. They liked the way it smelled, “like grass but fruity”. We learned that the sugar cane is not a fruit or a vegetable, it is a type of grass like bamboo. The surprise of the day was: we could taste it too! Sugar cane stores its sugar in its stems which makes them sweet. They were surprised to find out that the sugar cane was not meant to be eaten, just chewed to get the juice out. The juice is very sweet, but not everyone liked it, mostly because the texture was rough. Once again we gave thumbs up or thumbs down and recorded our data on our graph. (Ask your child if he/she liked the sugar cane). 

Now that we know where sugar comes from, another question pops up: How do they use the sugar to make candy? We decided to try it ourselves using just two ingredients: powder sugar and lime juice. We begin by mixing the two ingredients together, noticing that one was a solid and one was a liquid. We also noticed that it started looking like slime, and it didn’t look like candy at all. I asked them if they’ve ever eaten white candy before and they all said no. “Maybe we need to put color in it”, so we did. By now they know that we always use food coloring to add color because we can eat it too. They wanted to try orange and they remembered the colors they needed to make orange. When they started adding the red the mix became pink. Some students became surprised and other’s quickly replied: “It’s pink because red and white make pink!” We finally made the orange we needed but the consistency was still slimy. What do we do now? I explained that we needed it to look like playdough, so another student remembered what we usually do when our playdough is slimy: “we just need to add more flour!”, but wait a minute, flour is not one of the ingredients, so which one is our solid? Sugar! They know that if we add more liquid the mix will become more watery, but if we add a dry ingredient it will become more solid. I gave each a portion of the mix for them to feel it individually and add as much liquid (lime juice) or solid (sugar) as they needed. Once they felt the consistency was just right, meaning non-sticky, then they were ready to mold the candy in the shape they wanted. Then the best part: the tasting. Yum! We all gave thumbs up to our handmade candy. 

Skunk Stories. Each student became an author and an illustrator this week. I only gave them the main character of the story (the skunk) and they dictated their own story. They chose the gender and name of the character, the setting, the plot and the ending. Then they illustrated it in their journals. I read all the stories out loud without reveling the authors; we all had a good laugh. After hearing all the stories, they voted. We had two winners, and they picked their favorite from the two.  We then chose the three students who’d be the characters of the story and played it out. One student became the skunk, two became doctors and one more became a bee.  The rest of us were the audience. We had so much fun! (Ask your child about the story).

Teeth. We’ve been talking a lot about our teeth since a couple of our classmates lost a tooth recently. We remembered that our teeth are stronger than our bones, however, they still need a lot of everyday care. We read a few books about proper care of our teeth and what to do to keep them healthy, including staying away as much as possible of all sugary treats ;). We represented the number of teeth using an abacus and unifix cubes. Some students shared their experiences at the dentist and others remembered how many teeth they had counted at home with the help of mom/dad. We are wondering who’ll be the next student losing a tooth.