3/9/10 - 3/11/10

Tuesday, 3/9/10

Today was great. We began our Solar System unit today and I felt like all the kids were excited about this new adventure. Especially the boys. :) Our block center has Planet Heros, Spaceships and a space station. It was like a magnet all day for the kids.

We began morning meeting with a song we will sing for the next few weeks. A fun planet song to help us learn the order of the planets. It was met with much enthusiasm. We read Dogs in Space. A fun story about dogs visiting all the planets in our solar system. We learned a couple of basic facts about each planet. We followed that book up with The Solar System Book, brought in by Zaine. Jack was the first to pick up that this book was non fiction and our previous book was fiction. We ended our meeting by assigning a planet to every child. As a class we will learn about the planets in our Solar System but each child will focus in on their planet.

During AM centers aside from Planet Heroes and dressing up in Drama we painted our own planets. The kids used droppers and watercolors on coffee filters. They created beautiful planets.

After music with Ms. Chrissie and sharing our U sound bag items at lunch it was gym time with Ms. Jane. The theme of the hour was colors and fun.

PM Centers began with a review of our planets. I had puzzle pieces of the planets to match up with the planet words on our felt board. We decided which planet I was holding up and who this planet belonged to. Then the one who was assigned this planet would find the word on our felt board. The kids did great. Tomorrow they will be using these words as their resource when writing out the names of their planets.

When I dismissed them from the carpet we had more adventures with Planet Heroes, magnetic play and lots for Solar System puzzle building. :)

Wednesday, 3/10/10 (Ms. Chrissie's Corner)

Today we enjoyed our planet Earth! Upon arrival we began a fun art project to create the planet Earth the way astronauts see it from the moon - all blue, white and green color chunks and swirls made out of tissue and painted with liquid starch. It was alot of fun to see the different creations made by our out-this-world preschool artists!

Our new solar unit is so popular with our friends. Everyone came to school today eager to tell me what planet they were given yesterday. And then there are the new items in the classroom: from the library to the drama center to the blocks. So many things to explore we could barely wait to get to it. So we decided quite happily to play first and then have morning meeting prior to chapel rather than the other way around as usual. That's OK, we can reverse orbit every now and then!

At morning meeting we exercised our brains in a big way! We learned so many new things about our planets from a great book called Me and My Place in Space. It was perfect for helping us fill in the next section of the "K/W/L" chart Ms. Cari introduced on Tuesday. Today, we raised our hands whenever something we heard during the story caused us to "have a wondering". And, oh boy, did our friends have ALOT of wonderings!! Be sure to look at the chart. I can tell our students did alot of thinking on the subject of planets and the solar system! What great young minds they have. We found some of the answers ourselves on the pages of the book and in our own discussion during morning meeting. Other answers were discovered when we were lined up for chapel and had a couple minutes to spare during which I opened another book and read a few facts about each planet while we were washing up.

After lunch we enthusiastically ran out to the playground! Yes the playground! Some students actually squealed their way through the gate! It's been so long since we've been outside to play! It was a wonderful afternoon that we milked it for every minute possible.

We returned to our class to work on our Fact Sheets about our assigned planets. Each student wrote the name of their planet on a sentence strip using the resources available from the planet flannel board. Next we wrote things we learned today - Who, What & Where. What planet they have; Where it is in relation to the sun; and What fact they learned about their planet today. We used the book we read from morning meeting as a resource for reminders.

As soon as our work was done it was back to learning with our imaginations and reading books about space, and putting 20 stars in numerical order with our space partner. During snack time, we read the book On the Moon, which one student excitedly remarked, "oh cool, I've been wanting to read that one!". It was a great book about how astronauts get to the moon, what the moon is like, what it is like to go there and to be an astronaut and then come back home in a rocket ship. It even answered one of our "Wonderings" from this morning. It doesn't get any better than that.

Thursday, 3/11/10

Today was all about painting our planets. We whole punched Mercury and Pluto from our left over Eric Carle paintings. I had kids paint Jupiter, Saturn, Venus and Mars with a fun marble effect. The planet circles were put in pie tins and we decided what colors would work best for each planet. Then after globing the paint onto the circles the kids took turns rolling the marbles around in an effort to spread the paint amongst all the circles. There was a fine line in our rolling the tin to paint and rolling with too much enthusiasm and painting the floor as the marbles rolled out. :) It was fun. We added sparkles to Venus and to Mars our rocky red planet. For Uranus and Neptune we used water colors to create the green and blue planets.

After much painting and then cleaning of our room we sat down for morning meeting. I read to them Planets Around the Sun. A great non fiction book to once again back up our learned facts about our planets. We realized how just how big Jupiter is when we read about “The Great Red Spot” a storm on Jupiter. This storm is bigger then Earth. Wow! Another wow moment was when we read that if Earth was the size of a basketball, the sun would be as big as a basketball court. On Tuesday when you drop off take a moment to think that one over while in the gym. It puts things into perspective.

After music and lunch we went out on the playground again. Yea! The kids had a blast. You just don't realize how cooped up winter can make them till you get outside.

We began PM centers at the table with our personal fact sheets about our planets. We borrowed some oil pastel crayons from Ms Leigh and drew and colored our planet. A few of the kids had more facts to add to what they had learned about their planet as well.

We ended our day with a special snack. I cut pineapple rings and placed a cherry in the middle. Can you guess what our planet snack was? :) Saturn of course. :)